Despite helping to launch the Mozilla Foundation and releasing the code to its AOL Server software, America Online has never been synonymous with open source. But a number of new initiatives could change AOL's proprietary image, as the company strives to reach a broader audience on the open Web.
Faced with extending its core business strategy beyond its walled garden and rapidly falling subscriber numbers, AOL is looking outward—rather than inward—to bolster its arsenal of content and services. Specifically, AOL is enlisting the open source community to take over a number of projects. First on the list are two popular visualization plug-ins found in Winamp, AOL's digital media player that is used by over 60 million people worldwide.
News source:
eWeek
Here are some key features of "Exact Audio Copy":
Usage of the Windows 95 and Windows NT ASPI Interface, so both SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROM drives are supported
Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
Secure, fast and burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
Read error and complete loss of sync detection and correction in secure modes, as far as possible
Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions
Copy of ranges of music data, not only tracks
Automatic Speed reduction on errors and fallback afterwards
Normalization of extracted audio
Usage of the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression e.g. to MP3 waves
Support for the BladeEnc DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for online MP3 compression
Support of external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction
Batch compression and decompression of/to WAV files
Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
Detection of pre-track gaps
Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
Automatic creation of CUE sheets for CDRWin, including all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC
CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching
Sample Offsets for drives with no accurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
Option for synchronizing tracks for non-accurate stream drives
Filename editing with local and remote CDDB database and cdplayer.ini support and more features like ID3 tagging
Browse and edit local database
Certified Escient CDDB(TM) Compatible
Local CDDB support
Record and Loop Record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
Automatic rename of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
Catalog extraction function
Multisession (CD-Extra) support
CD-Text support
CD-Write support for some drives
ID3 Tag editor with drag and drop possibility from track listing and database
Glitch removal after extraction
Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and more)
Program is Cardware, so feel free to copy
I am sure MS would like to scoop them up if they do get spinned off, and control most of IM.
They arent going anywhere. Just need to broaden the prospects.
AOL can't tell Mozilla Foundation what to do though, because if they did, we'd have AOL branding all over Firefox and Thunderbird, wouldn't we?
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