Gracenote Introduces Innovative Voice Control and Automatic Playlist Solutions for Navigation of Digital Music Collections on Auto, Portable and Mobile Devices

LAS VEGAS--Jan. 5, 2006--

New MediaVOCS and Playlist Plus Products on Display at CES Allow Consumers to Easily Access and Enjoy Their Entire Digital Music Collection with a Simple Voice Command or Touch of a Button

Gracenote(R), a global leader in digital entertainment technology, today announced MediaVOCS(TM), a speech recognition solution for hands-free control of music collections, and Playlist Plus(TM), a content recognition and automatic playlist creation solution for devices with limited resources and connectivity. When combined together, the two enable consumers to find and play the specific music they want to hear with a simple command, or to instantly create an automatic playlist of similar music to a seed song, artist or album. MediaVOCS and Playlist Plus can be used independently or together. MediaVOCS, a CES Innovations Award honoree, can also be utilized to control other Gracenote products, such as MusicID(TM), Playlist(TM) and Link(TM).

As digital music downloads become more and more popular, consumers are amassing music collections containing thousands of tracks. Quickly finding that special song to match your mood is becoming very difficult in this environment, particularly on devices with small screens and limited controls. With MediaVOCs and Playlist Plus, consumers can now easily and rapidly find and play the music they want on CE devices such as MP3 players, mobile phones and car stereos -- no matter how many files are in the music collection.

With a MediaVOCS and Playlist Plus-enabled car head unit, consumers can now use spoken requests to generate playlists of songs residing on a connected portable MP3 player or music-enabled mobile phone. Playlist Plus enables control of the portable device without having to transfer the music library to the car stereo. They just work together automatically.

Additionally, Playlist Plus utilizes a proprietary embedded database of relational music similarity data that offers the More Like This(TM) feature, allowing automatic playlisting regardless of the quality or completeness of the files' descriptive file tags or the presence of pre-defined playlists on the connected device.

"Today's music consumers have busy lives, and they want their digital music to keep up with them," said Craig Palmer, CEO of Gracenote. "MediaVOCS and Playlist Plus allow consumers to easily and safely navigate their collection, listen to music and create playlists while they're in the car or on the go."

MediaVOCS -- Say It, Then Play It

Gracenote MediaVOCS makes accessing and playing music simple, intuitive and as easy as the spoken word. In a world where people are building music collections of thousands of tracks, voice control is an invaluable way for people to interact with consumer electronic devices when other methods are impractical -- while driving a car, speaking on a cell phone, or using an MP3 player with a tiny screen.

MediaVOCS is specifically designed for digital entertainment applications as an enhancement to existing automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) solutions. It includes phonetic transcription data and variants to handle problematic artist, album and track names that defy the default pronunciations of standard voice recognition technology. For example, with MediaVOCS, the music fan does not have to say "A C slash D C" in order to hear AC/DC tracks. MediaVOCS can even recognize common mispronunciations of unusual artist names.

Users can also use nicknames, short names, initials, acronyms and abbreviations to request favorite artists and song titles, such as "The King" for Elvis Presley, "Aretha" for Aretha Franklin, or "Chestnuts Roasting Over an Open Fire" for the "The Christmas Song."

MediaVOCS allows music fans to play any individual song or artist by simply saying its name, such as "Play Song Pinball Wizard." It also works in conjunction with Gracenote's automatic playlist technology to create instant playlists. A consumer can say "Play 40's Female Jazz Vocalists" to instantly create a specific mood or say "More Like This" to generate a playlist of songs that match the mood of the song that is already playing. MediaVOCS also enables consumers to get more information about their music by asking "What is This?". The TTS module will then use the data provided by MediaVOCS to speak the name and artist of the song playing.

Playlist Plus -- Mix Your Music to Match Your Mood

Playlist Plus analyzes your music to link to a compact, yet sophisticated internal database of relational music information, enabling advanced automatic playlisting. Playlist Plus does not require a host computer or online lookups and easily runs in the resource constrained environments typical of portable, mobile and automotive devices.

Playlist Plus is powered by proprietary metadata types developed by Gracenote's editorial team of music experts, including Gracenote's newly expanded Global Genre System and other extended music attributes. These let Playlist Plus find subtle relationships between songs normally missed by less sophisticated systems. For example, a Punk Pop song may be more similar to a Ska Revival song than it might be to one belonging to another Punk sub-category, such as Hardcore Punk.

The new Playlist Plus and MediaVOCS products will be unveiled at CES, Las Vegas, January 5 - 8, 2006, South Hall 3, Booth 31642.

About Gracenote

Gracenote is a leader in global digital entertainment technology. Formerly known as CDDB, Gracenote provides businesses with critical embedded software and metadata that enable consumers to better manage, enjoy and discover digital media. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, Gracenote also has offices in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Seoul. Gracenote's solutions are embedded in leading media players such as Apple iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine, RealNetworks Rhapsody, Napster and AOL Winamp, as well as software applications for Creative and iRiver portable devices. Gracenote's technology powers leading home and automobile consumer electronics brands such as Alpine, Denon and Marantz, Kenwood, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony and Yamaha, as well as international mobile music applications for KDDI (Japan), KTF (Korea), Musiwave (Portugal), Oi (Brazil) and Golden Bytes (Benelux). For more information about Gracenote, please refer to www.gracenote.com/corporate/.