Village Gamer

Montreal – Audiokinetic® and Emergent™ have teamed up to provide the video game industry’s only cross-platform, multi-genre development system that fully addresses the audio needs of programmers, game designers, artists and sound designers by including Wwise right out of the box with every Gamebryo® LightSpeed™ license. The flexibility of LightSpeed’s core technology allows the art of game development to easily evolve across every function of development.

Audiokinetic’s Wwise offers audio programmers and sound designers a complete audio authoring tool with a powerful sound engine, greatly improving workflow while pushing the limits of sound design. Coupled with LightSpeed, Wwise allows developers to audit, profile, and modify sounds in real-time within the current build of the game. This new bundle further simplifies workflow by allowing designers and artists to generate and iterate on any type of asset during all phases of development without recompiling. Content creation is sped up and programmers are free to devote their efforts to game?specific tech for new kinds of gameplay instead of adding and tweaking game content.
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New effect plug-ins to be available for Wwise

Montreal/San Francisco – Audiokinetic Inc. and McDSP announced today that they have entered a technical partnership. As part of this agreement, McDSP will develop plug-ins for Wwise, Audiokinetic’s audio pipeline solution.

Audiokinetic is the leading audio solution provider for the video game industry. Its flagship product, Wwise, revolutionizes the traditional game audio development process and allows users to audit, profile, and modify sounds in real-time within the game itself.

McDSP, a California-based software company, has been providing high-quality effect plug-ins for the last 10 years. Products like ML4000 (Multi-band Dynamics and Mastering Limiter) and Revolver (Flexible Convolution Reverb) reflect the company’s reputation of excellence, and have won several industry awards. Until now, McDSP plug-ins were available for Pro Tools only, and targeted the film and music industry.

As part of the partnership with Audiokinetic, McDSP will provide Wwise users with a selection of effect plug-ins, which will be accessible directly in Wwise’s user interface. Details about the plug-ins that will be available, as well as licensing particulars will be made public shortly; the plug-ins will be available in Wwise later in 2009.
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Vancouver/San Francisco – The next generation of video games are wowing gamers with unprecedented high def graphics and gameplay that pushes the boundaries of what the new systems have to offer. An exciting new technology now promises to bring game audio to the next level as well. At this year’s Game Developers Conference, DTS Inc will educate developers on their cutting edge DTS Neural Surround Sound technology that enables games to present real-time, discrete 7.1 soundtracks on the Wii, Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and via PC.

“Our goal is to give developers the audio tools to help them create gaming experiences more immersive than ever before,” says Mark Tuffy, Director of Business Development, Interactive Media at DTS. “With our DTS Neural Surround technology, games will deliver true 360 degree gaming for the first time ever. The potential here for what sound does in a game is almost limitless.”

By using existing technology built into the systems, DTS Neural Surround is able to convert the 5.1 signal into a true 7.1 surround experience. Whether the signal is digital or analog, DTS Neural Surround is able to convert the sound into rich, fully immersive 7.1 channel surround sound. Now, when gamers hear something creeping up behind them, the sound will really be there.

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New SoundSeed module will generate wind and “swoosh” sounds

Montreal/San Francisco GDC – Today at the Game Developers Conference, Audiokinetic Inc., the leading audio solution provider for the video game industry, unveiled SoundSeed Air, the new module of the SoundSeed product family.

SoundSeed is a family of interactive sound generators for game audio. It uses innovative digital sound processing (DSP) technology to create varied, hence highly immersive, audio environments, while keeping runtime memory usage and recording costs at a minimum.

SoundSeed Air is the latest addition to the SoundSeed family. This new module involves two source plug-ins. The first one is called “Wind” and generates dynamic and never-repeating ambiances while the second one, “Swoosh” produces short air displacement effects such as sword slashing or dragon wings flaps.

As SoundSeed Air is a pure parametric synthesis technology it does not require wave files and it has the potential to produce hours of none-repeating ambiances using virtually no runtime memory.

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Montreal – Audiokinetic Inc., the leading audio solution provider for the video game industry, announced today that its audio pipeline solution, Wwise®, will be used in the development of EVE Online, the critically-acclaimed massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) developed by the award-winning virtual world developer CCP.

EVE Online is a science fiction-based MMOG in which over a quarter of a million players inhabit a vast, persistent world as starship pilots in pursuit of fame, wealth and glory. First launched in 2003, the latest free expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha, was released on March 10, 2009. Noted for its fervent use of cutting edge technology, CCP’s server architecture makes large-scale fleet battles a reality, with upwards of one thousand participants engaged in epic conflicts for control of resources and strategic regions of space.

Sound plays an important role in the immersion factor for these intergalactic gladiators. There were numerous advantages to having Wwise tools available to the CCP Audio team during the development phase for Apocrypha as described by Audio Director Baldur Baldursson.

“Ease of use was one of the key factors in our decision to choose Audiokinetic over other middleware solutions we tested,” said Baldursson. “Audiokinetic seems very serious in creating powerful tools that actually work for sound designers and musicians. We were able to focus on designing the sounds themselves instead of having to worry about technology issues – and integrating the actual sounds was fun.”
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Markham ON – MAGIX, a leader in multimedia software, leverages Dolby technology within their premium products to the market. MAGIX has incorporated Dolby’s award winning technology, Dolby® Digital 5.1 Creator, into its own award winning software, Video Editing Software Movie Edit Pro and its professional video editing software Professional Video Editing Software - Video Pro X.

Dolby Digital 5.1 Creator maintains audio fidelity while preserving valuable disc space to allow for sharper picture quality or longer recording time. Dolby Digital 5.1 is crucial for the truly amazing audio creation in MAGIX video editing software tools. Users are able to create professional surround effects with Dolby Digital 5.1 Creator surround creator, so MAGIX included it in a number of their key products for people to create real surround sound with channel control and live mixing.

“Dolby Digital 5.1 Creator brings brilliant surround cinema sound to your DVDs or Blu-ray Discs. We are happy to work together with Dolby, the leader in multi-channel sound processing. This truly makes Video Pro X and Movie Edit Pro powerful video and audio editing tools.” says Senior Product Manager Video at MAGIX, Sven Kardelke.

MAGIX continues to work closely with Dolby technology to deliver professional tools to its customers and ensure the highest fidelity experience.

Wwise to be integrated into Epic’s Unreal Engine 3

Montreal - Audiokinetic Inc. and Epic Games, Inc. have announced that Wwise, the industry’s leading audio pipeline solution, is now integrated with Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 (UE3), the number one game engine for cross-platform game development. As a member of Epic’s exclusive Integrated Partners Programme (IPP), Audiokinetic provides a complete integration that will allow developers and publishers licensing UE3 to easily integrate Wwise into their development pipeline.

Wwise is a complete audio pipeline solution that features the tight integration of an advanced audio authoring tool and a robust sound engine. Designed for next-generation platforms, Wwise aims to revolutionize the traditional game audio development process and allows users to audit, profile, and modify sounds in real-time within the game itself. Wwise is presently being used in the development of 85 titles, a significant percent of which are powered by UE3.
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Toronto – What kind of a future does 2009 hold in store for voice overs and the language services industry? Quite a bright one indeed according to the 2009 Report (PDF) released by the experts at Voices.com, revealing that $10.9 billion was spent in 2008 on language services and voice recording, an industry that is expected to grow by 7.5% to $11.7 billion in 2009. Voices.com is an online workplace that connects buyers with sellers of voice over and audio recording services.

Alongside rising sales for MP3 players, mobile phones and gaming consoles, the demand for voice acting in podcasts, audiobooks and video games has naturally increased as a result, becoming even more relevant to everyday consumers as the applications soar in popularity and reach new market demographics.

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Toronto – Guitar Hype is the new Web 2.0 Guitar website which provides guitar enthusiasts with a more effective, interactive interface, designed to increase their exposure to the world of guitars.

The development of a new guitar website based on Web 2.0 model with video upload capabilities has been underway since September 16, 2008. The website, called Guitar Hype, will provide guitar enthusiasts with a platform to showcase their talents and increase their exposure to the media and the general public. It will also provide both the up loaders and the audience with an attractive way to watch unique, user-produced guitar videos and songs without the hassle of actively searching for the content.

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