Agere Adds Windows Media Support to Mobile Chipset

Agere Systems is enhancing its mobile phone chipset to support the Microsoft Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, an important feature for adding music download capabilities to mass-market phones.



Agere's Vision X115 solution supports Windows Media Audio 9.1, the format's most current version, which includes specific codecs for multi-channel surround sound and voice encoding. WMA provides both constant and variable bit rate (VBR) encoding. With VBR, the encoding bit rate increases to capture complex sections of data, and then decreases to compress less complex sections, enabling the compact, high-quality audio files required for small-form-factor, mobile devices.



Agere expects to be able to support the launch of Windows Media Audio-capable handsets in the second half of 2006.

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