FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Culver City, Calif., June 1, 1998: 4Front Technologies is announcing the availability of Open Sound System(TM) version 3.9 for Solaris 2.6 running on PCI bus based UltraSPARC workstations from Sun Microsystems and other Ultra-AX vendors. OSS provides sound card drivers for the Ensoniq AudioPCI and Creative Labs PCI64 soundcards under Solaris. These drivers support digital audio, MIDI, Synthesizers and mixers found on these sound cards. OSS provides a user-friendly GUI which makes the installation of sound drivers and configuration of sound cards very simple! OSS drivers support automatic sound card detection, Plug-n-Play, as well as support for Java audio. 4Front is also pleased to introduce its SoftOSS technology for Solaris. SoftOSS provides a software based wave-table engine that can render MIDI and MOD music files without requiring any special wave-table hardware. Any 16bit soundcard can now playback MIDI music via wave-table synthesis. SoftOSS provides real-time mixing of up to 32 audio channels. A new component of SoftOSS called Virtual Mixer also provides real-time mixing of up to 8 stereo audio channels. The Virtual Mixer will enable users to configure up to 8 audio applications to output sound at the same time. It is particularly useful when one needs to hear audio output from browsers, window managers, streaming audio, and games simultaneously. The drivers also come bundled with an exciting new multiformat audio player capable of playing .wav, .au, .voc and .mp3 (MPEG-audio-layer3) files. OSSplayer has a highly optimized MP3 audio engine that has the lowest CPU load of all UNIX MP3 players currently available. Additionally, it has a real time full spectrum analyzer and provides unique play-list generation capability which can be used to create personal audio compilations. OSSplayer also provides an on-the-fly GUI replacement (known as Skins). Finally, OSSplayer also provides HTTP and FTP streaming and hence it can be used as a helper app with Netscape/Mozilla browsers to play mp3 audio content streamed from the Internet. OSS sound drivers comply with the Open Sound System API spec. Solaris 2.6 users can visit 4Front's WWW site at http://www.opensound.com/ to download a "free" trial version of OSS or buy a fully licensed version of OSS for only $40.00. The licensed version of OSS comes with free technical support and free updates to the drivers. --- xxx --- All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners. Open Sound System is a trademark of 4Front Technologies. Copyright (C) 1996-1998 4Front Technologies, All Rights Reserved. Contact: Dev Mazumdar 4Front Technologies 11698 Montana Avenue, Suite 12 Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A. Tel: (310) 820 7365 E-mail: info@4front-tech.com Fax: (310) 826 2465 Web: http://www.4front-tech.com