And no, we’re not talking about some weird fusion of Silverchair and Bon Jovi. Instead, we’re talking about SLS, or Scalable To Lossless (we assume that there’s something lost in translation here), a music format that lets you buy a track at a certain bitrate, and then “add-on” all the missing sound at a later date.
The technology is from a joint venture from Singapore including Soundbuzz, Exploit Technologies and the marketing and commercialisation arm of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). Soundbuzz has launched an online store in Singapore to sell the tracks for S$2.50 (about $1.98) for the standard compression, or S$3.00 (about $2.39) for a lossless file.
This isn’t exactly new news, but it’s actually pretty important for the Australian market. Soundbuzz, the company that manages the online and mobile music stores for Telstra BigPond and Optus Zoo, has been taken over 100 per cent by Motorola. Considering they’re the biggest online and mobile music company, offering over 750,000 songs and 500,000 mobile derivitatives (like truetones), this suddenly makes Motorola a big player in the mobile music space. According to Motorola, the move is a part of their strategy to create the complete music experience on the mobile, along with their new range of music handsets, including the ROKR E8.
