Apple Licenses Roland's Sound Canvas and GS Technology for Quicktime 3.0

Apple Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) today announced it has licensed Roland Corporation's Sound Canvas sound set and GS Format extensions for inclusion in QuickTime 3.0, the latest version of the Company's award-winning, industry-standard software architecture for creating and publishing digital media for Mac OS and Windows.

The new QuickTime 3.0 musical capabilities promise expanded creative control for music and multimedia content publishers and a better sounding musical experience for consumers. An updated developer preview release of QuickTime 3.0 and the new music instrument sound set are available for immediate download from the World Wide Web at: http://www.quicktime.apple.com.

The Roland sound set to be included with QuickTime 3.0 consists of 128 General MIDI-compatible instruments plus more than 100 additional sounds from a variety of instrument categories including keyboards, woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion, and sound effects.

Roland's GS Format extends the General MIDI specification by defining additional music performance controls that provide greater accuracy, consistency, and expressiveness for MIDI-based interactive audio. QuickTime's support for this popular music format will enable high-fidelity playback of existing GS-format MIDI content and will provide music publishers enhanced creative control. "Roland Corporation firmly believes that the key to the success of interactive audio using MIDI is the accurate playback of varied music content," said Ikutaro Kakehashi, Chairman and CEO of Roland Corporation. "We are proud that Apple has chosen Roland's Sound Canvas sound set and GS Format for QuickTime 3.0. This will provide an improvement in the quality of interactive audio worldwide, as well as enhance the compatibility and expand the use of MIDI."

"For music and multimedia content publishers, the Roland technologies combined with QuickTime 3.0's advanced music architecture represent a significant milestone in the development of interactive audio," said Avie Tevanian, senior vice president of Software Engineering, Apple Computer, Inc. "For the first time, it is now possible to create high-quality MIDI music that can be reliably and faithfully reproduced on the consumer's computer."

MIDI Music Comes of Age on Internet with QuickTime 3.0

QuickTime 3.0 combined with Roland's sound set provides a wonderfully rich library of built-in instruments. In addition, QuickTime features the ability to utilize custom-designed instruments that can replace or augment the pre-defined instrument set. The combination of MIDI's small file sizes and QuickTime's powerful built-in music synthesizer features creates a truly compelling alternative for low bit-rate, high-quality, Internet audio.

QuickTime's music features are just one piece of its comprehensive media integration architecture. Utilizing QuickTime's extensive text, video, graphics, animation, and sound features, along with QuickTime's sophisticated webpage authoring features, content creators are able to easily author and publish stunning, synchronized, mixed-media presentations ideally suited for today's Internet. For the first time, with the introduction of QuickTime 3.0, content creators can use the full range of QuickTime's music functionality on all major personal computer platforms, including Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 7, Windows 95 and Windows NT.

Since QuickTime is already supported by a wide range of software tool vendors, content creators can begin taking advantage of QuickTime's music and interactive audio features immediately. "Now, with QuickTime 3.0's multi-platform architecture, Roland's high-quality musical library, and MIDI's highly compressed music format, application and content developers have an ideal convergence of technologies to accelerate the use of music on the Internet," said Ralph Rogers, principal analyst for Multimedia, Dataquest.

QuickTime: The Foundation for Digital Media Creation and Delivery

Since its first release in 1991, QuickTime has been the recognized leader in software technology for the creation and delivery of multimedia content. QuickTime is used for professional video editing, web site creation, and the development of CD-ROMs. QuickTime 3.0 has already won several industry awards including Videography's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) '97 Editors' Choice Award, Television Broadcast Magazine's NAB Editors' Pick of Show Award, and New Media's Hyper Award for System Software.

QuickTime's music feature set provides an integrated, scalable, and extensible software architecture for instrument creation, music recording, editing, playback, and publishing. With QuickTime 3.0, Apple delivers the third major revision to its interactive music feature set and builds upon the MIDI sound set originally licensed to Apple by Roland Corporation in 1994. This release incorporates significant enhancements for music and audio synthesis, MIDI interoperability, and media integration, and provides all of these features for Mac OS and Windows users.

Availability/Licensing

QuickTime 3.0 is expected to be available January 1998. The QuickTime 3.0 Developer Preview Release is currently available via download from the web at http://www.quicktime.apple.com/preview/. Developers may license the current version of QuickTime for redistribution with applications, titles, and media clip libraries that support QuickTime. For additional licensing information, contact Apple Software Licensing by phone at: 512-919-2645 or by email at: sw.license@apple.com.

Apple Computer, Inc. ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II, and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is now recommitted to its original mission-to bring the best personal computing products and support to students, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, businesspersons and consumers in over 140 countries around the world.