November 16th, 1999

[8:30 AM] Consolidation Of Mac MP3 Market Begins With Proteron Acquisition by Staff Proteron Software has announced the acquisition of MPecker from @Soft, thus beginning the first round of consolidation in the Mac MP3 market. Proteron will market the product as MPegger until it is consolidated with their MP3 flagship, N2MP3. According to Proteron: Proteron, LLC today announced the acquisition of the digital audio encoder "MPecker" from @Soft, Inc. MPecker by Rafael Luebbert, pioneered MP3 encoding on the Macintosh and remains the only Mac encoder which supports MPEG Layer II (MP2). With the acquisition, Proteron brings to market an exciting product which was previously unavailable because of international patent restrictions on MP3 technology. The acquisition is a landmark in the Macintosh MP3 world and solidifies Proteron's lead as the premier developer of MP3 encoding software for the Mac. Making the announcement from COMDEX, Sam Caughron, President of Proteron, explained, "With this agreement, Proteron adds to its assets a wealth of development experience with MP3 as well as solid technology for the improvement of its flagship product, N2MP3." Until N2MP3 and MPecker can be merged into a single, powerful utility, MPecker will be marketed and sold by Proteron under the new name "MPegger". It will support encoding of AIFF, Sound Designer II and PCM audio files into both MP3 and MP2 files. Normalization, resampling and extensive control of file naming are other highlights of the MPegger encoder. An exact release date has not been set for the hybrid uber-encoder, but the product is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2000. The uber-encoder is expected to include the best features from both N2MP3 and MPegger as well as real-time audio recording/encoding. MPegger will be priced at US$24.95. The company has more information on the product at their web site. The Mac Observer Spin: The Mac MP3 market is far more crowded and robust than the much larger Windows MP3 market which is dominated by WinAMP, a free product. While the Mac has several commercial MP3 products available, the competition is fairly fierce due to the smaller nature of that market. Consolidation in one form or another is fairly inevitable and we think that this will be seen as one of the first moves. Proteron - N2MP3