Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) Container Specification Enables Ecosystem-Wide Innovation in the Immersive Spatial Audio Domain

Advancements in immersive spatial audio are influencing the audio expectations of consumers. However, to enable wide-scale ecosystem deployments, OTT services and hardware device vendors will benefit from license-free spatial audio technologies. Similarly, creators seek formats with immersive audio mixing options that would easily work with the current streaming and playback systems. To solve this challenge, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) today announced the release of the Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) container specification, the organization's first-ever audio container specification to be offered under AOMedia’s royalty-free license. IAMF is designed to enable creatives to revolutionize immersive audio experiences across a myriad of applications, from streaming and gaming to augmented reality and virtual reality, as well as traditional broadcasting.

Whether broadcasting live sports, or binging on a favorite show, immersive audio is becoming a bigger part of consumers’ daily lives. AOMedia developed IAMF specifically for the internet audio era, paving the way for companies to make immersive audio part of the devices, products, and services that consumers love. As a result of these efforts, IAMF is a codec-agnostic container specification that can carry information for playback time rendering algorithms and audio mixing.

“IAMF represents a significant step forward in open immersive audio standards. Not only does it cater to diverse use cases, including streaming, gaming, augmented reality, virtual reality, and broadcasting, but it will also provide creators with the tools to craft immersive audio experiences that captivate audiences. As an open media project, IAMF is easily accessible to implementers worldwide, it fosters innovation, empowers developers, and ensures the broad availability of rich, immersive audio experiences that consumers want,” said AOMedia Chair Matt Frost. “I’d like to thank the Storage and Transport Formats (STF) Working Group for their work on this audio specification. IAMF continues to evolve, and it is exciting to see how this working group is already thinking of the features for the next release.”

Highlights of AOMedia’s First-ever Audio Specification IAMF Include:

• Spatial Audio for All Devices: IAMF enables the seamless delivery of both channel-based and scene-based, ambisonics spatial audio presentations to a wide range of devices, including headphones, mobile phones, televisions, soundbars, home theater systems and web. This versatility ensures a consistent, high-quality audio experience across various platforms.
• Flexible Audio Delivery: IAMF offers a flexible approach to delivering different types of audio elements to end devices. Whether it is 3.1.2 channel audio combined with stereo audio or third-order ambisonics paired with non-diegetic stereo audio, IAMF makes it possible. IAMF provides means to signal rendering algorithms, such as EAR and BEAR, for playback in loudspeaker layouts and headphones.
• Creator-Friendly: Creators can dive into IAMF-compliant immersive audio content creation with the existing open source plugins such as the EAR Production Suite, which includes renderers for multi-speaker layouts and binaural monitoring, compliant with IAMF specification guidelines. IAMF’s ability to carry and include multiple audio mix configurations enables creator and user controllable loudness adjustments for different playback preferences. In the near future, the AOMedia open source reference software will add an IAMF encoding tool for compressing various sound mixes to IAMF.

AOMedia IAMF Specification and Reference Software Decoder Availability

The IAMF specification and reference software decoder, complete with test streams, are readily accessible on AOMedia’s GitHub, fostering collaboration and community-driven development. For more information about IAMF and its potential applications, please visit AOMedia’s Getting Started page.

About the Alliance for Open Media

Launched in 2015, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) was formed to define and develop technologies to address marketplace demand for open standards for media compression and delivery. Board-level, Founding Members include Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics and Tencent. Visit www.aomedia.org or follow AOMedia on LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter) at @a4omedia.

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