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Audible Magic Corporation Wednesday announced its acquisition of Muscle Fish LLC, a Berkeley-based company founded by acoustic engineers formerly from Yamaha Music Technologies, Inc. Muscle Fish engineers pioneered the use of content-based analysis and classification of audio files with over six years of extensive research and development.

Muscle Fish's invention, embodied in a patent issued last year, measures a variety of psycho-perceptual characteristics of the audio file. These measurements can be used to analyze, compare, classify, and retrieve audio files. The technology performs exact pattern matching for a range of file formats, including streaming audio on the Internet. In addition, it can be used to match and identify "similar sounding" audio files, returning a list of closest matches to the user and is robust enough to identify streaming content for all streaming formats. With over 10,000 Internet radio stations, streaming is fast becoming the preferred method of delivering content, and as a result, the market potential for Audible Magic identification services is growing exponentially.

"Muscle Fish invested over six years of hard work pioneering the concepts and developing the core technology," stated Vance Ikezoye, CEO and co-founder of Audible Magic. "Now that their innovative concepts have been accepted and proven, Audible Magic intends to monetize their work by using the technology to enable a wide variety of applications."

"Audible Magic's software allows record companies and online music companies to do many things they weren't able to do before," said Malcolm Maclachlan, a senior analyst in Consumer eCommerce Media at International Data Corporation. He added, "For instance, it is now possible to run a peer to peer subscription and still pay artists the correct amount of money for their work. Consumers, in turn, can now be guaranteed that the song they download is the one they want, and will have a certain standard of sound quality."

The technology has been licensed and is in use today by a number of companies including Virage and the Bulldog Group. In addition, the company has demonstrated the accuracy of the technology, claiming automated song recognition accuracy in the above 95% today for both Internet and traditional broadcast radio broadcasts as well as highly compressed MP3 files.

"The value of the Muscle Fish acquisition will be seen not only in audio content identification, but with the digital media access, control and monetization opportunities it enables," according to Ikezoye. "We are already working with a number of customers on some very intriguing applications and have multiple patents pending, so stay tuned."