Microsoft claims its WMA technology fits high quality music in half the file size of the MP3 format, and that WMA is now supported by more than 500 consumer electronic devices including DVD players, set-top boxes, car stereos, and portable music players.
According to Tensilica, in addition to supporting WMA, the Xtensa HiFi Audio Engine also supports Dolby Digital AC-3 decode and consumer encode, MP3 decode and encode, MPEG-2/4 AAC decode and encode, and the G723-1 and G729AB speech codecs. Because the engine is programmable, multiple audio formats can run on the same hardware, allowing the same silicon to be used for multiple applications. In addition, designers can further customize the underlying Xtensa processor so that it can be used for other functions on the chip.
Tensilica says the 24-bit Xtensa HiFi Audio Engine has inherent advantages over the 16-bit audio processors commonly used today, in that it provides superior sound quality of compressed files due to the increased precision available for intermediate calculations in the compression and decompression algorithms.
The algorithm solutions for the Xtensa HiFi Audio Engine were designed and developed by CuTe Solutions, Hyderabad, India, according to Tensilica.
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