Oak Technology announced today that it has signed an agreement with Liquid Audio to provide the Recorder SDK of its award-winning SimpliCD software. This agreement enables Liquid Audio's next-generation products to record compressed audio files on CD in accordance with the Optical Storage Trade Association's (OSTA) MultiAudio specification.

OSTA's MultiAudio format creates a Table of Contents used for retrieval, management and playback of compressed audio files, and enables CDs made from compressed audio files (such as MP3 and WMA files) to be played back as easily as standard audio CDs on either a PC or consumer electronics device. The playback device can quickly read the Table of Contents, bypassing the lengthy delays for disc initialization that can occur while the player identifies all of the files on the disc. In addition, it allows playlists to be created so songs can be accessed by genre, album, artist or a custom grouping created by the user.

"We selected Oak's SimpliCD Recorder SDK as the first software recording solution to support OSTA's MultiAudio compatibility standard for compressed audio files," said Micah Stroud, Senior Product Marketing Manager for client technology for Liquid Audio, Inc. "We're pleased to offer one of the first media players that eliminates the delays previously experienced with CDs made from MP3 files and gives consumers the ability to easily organize their compressed music on CDs."

Liquid Audio, a leading provider of software, infrastructure and services for the digital delivery of secure media over the Internet, plans to implement SimpliCD with its Liquid Player software to enable the burning of MultiAudio-compatible CDs of compressed audio files. The first product scheduled to ship with Oak's SimpliCD is Liquid? Player Special Edition 6.1, which allows consumers to download, purchase and play back digital music and rip and burn custom audio CDs, all from one application.

"Our CD recording software libraries have been selected by leading software and hardware providers of the consumer audio market," said Felix Nemirovsky, general manager for Oak's Optical Media Software Group. "We are excited that our work in developing the MultiAudio logical disc format with OSTA has paid off, helping users address challenges faced when playing CDs containing hundreds of songs in compressed audio format."