New lossless audio coding technologies that need higher bandwidth and larger storage capacities may now be appropriate for many applications and have been gaining attention in recent years. In addressing this need,
MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) in October 2002 to solicit a technology that could address all these needs. The CfP requested proposals for a
lossless and scalable technology that was backward compatible with the existing MPEG
AAC codec, and could operate efficiently at several different sampling rates and word length combinations. Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) technologies were adopted for the scalable to lossless coding (14496-3/AMD5) architecture Reference Model 0. I2R offers a fully scalable to lossless audio coding solution. On top of the core AAC codec, a scalable extension layer increases the signal-to-noise ratio, reaching lossless quality at data rates comparable to those of current pure lossless audio codecs, that is, at average compression ratios of about 58%. The scalability of the extension makes this combination a coding solution for production environments, where the result is to be transmitted to several recipients through channels of differing
bandwidth. Furthermore, for private and professional use in music archives, this enables storing the original music data and transferring compressed copies (e.g. to portable devices) without transcoding. == Licensing ==