Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec

The Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec Plug-In is designed for the real-time auditioning, encoding and decoding of audio signals using Fraunhofer codecs.

In the past it has not been possible to critically audition and then encode multiple formats in real time within a host DAW environment. The revolutionary Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec now makes this possible, and includes extensive monitoring tools and built-in encoding/decoding features.

Using this plug-in mix engineers may produce mixes optimized towards specific target codecs, thereby ensuring maximum fidelity. Similarly, Mastering engineers may audition in the final format and produce compensated masters for final encoding and distribution.

The primary purpose of the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec is to provide a way of monitoring your host session material using the highly regarded Fraunhofer encoders, without the need for offline processing. By auditioning and comparing codecs online, it allows you to make executive decisions on the best codecs to use, and when all is complete, then write the encoded audio to disk.

Also contained within the plug-in is a fully featured offline encode window. You can compress Wav or Aiff files for offline batch processing with the codecs and settings of your choice.

When you need to import an encoded file into your project, but the host does not recognize the file format, the plug-in also has an offline decode section. This eliminates the need for any proprietary applications to be used when importing encoded material into your session.

By default the ONLINE mode is active, and the centre panel of the GUI contains a large FFT display, showing the spectral content of the input signal in yellow and the DIFF signal in red (the difference between the input and output signals).

Beneath the FFT window the CODEC LIST contains five rows that allow the selection of up to five codecs simultaneously. The associated MON buttons allow monitoring of the selected codec. The ARM buttons allow selection for online recording to an encoded file.

To the right of the codec list are three tabbed windows; shown here is the BITSTREAM LEVEL / TRIM window. There is also a COMPRESSION tab that gives an indication of the data compression for the selected codecs, and an A-B tab that allows A-B and A-B-X auditioning.