Fraunhofer Society

The Fraunhofer Society is a German research organization. The German name is Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and is often abbreviated FhG. The organization is comprised of several institutes. One in particular, Fraunhofer IIS, has had a significant role in the development of digital audio technologies.

Fraunhofer collects patent license fees on MP3 and AAC codecs.

Fraunhofer IIS Codecs

• FhG MP3, a licensed MP3 encoder included in Winamp
• FhG AAC, a licensed AAC encoder included in Winamp
  • Optimized for encoding music on desktop-class processors using floating-point math
  • Not open source
• Fraunhofer FDK AAC, included in Android
  • Optimized for low-delay encoding of real-time communication on embedded systems/mobile phones, using fixed-point math
  • Source code available as part of the Android Open Source Project

External Links

• Fraunhofer Society at Wikipedia