Gracenote, the worldwide leader in information services for digital music and media, today announced the beta release of the Gracenote Encode Software Development Toolkit (SDK) for non-commercial developers, on a royalty-free basis. This is the first version of the CDDB SDK to offer full mp3 encoding and decoding functionality, as well as mp3PRO decoding. This offering is a result of Gracenote's unique partnership with Thomson, the licensor of mp3 and mp3PRO technology, to provide music recognition services that are integrated with the world's most popular digital music codec. The addition of encoding functionality provides non-commercial developers with everything needed to create fully functional mp3 jukeboxes that both create digital music files and utilize the Gracenote CDDB music recognition service. Gracenote CDDB is an Internet-based service providing information for more than 1.8 million albums that enables developers to display artist, title, and track names and automatically label and categorize mp3 files as they are created. Over 8,000 non-commercial developers currently license Gracenote's non-commercial SDK to create software applications that access Gracenote CDDB.

"We want to provide developers with the tools that best enable them to share CDDB with their users," stated Melani Di Napoli, Director of Product Management for Gracenote. "We're proud to partner with Thomson to provide the first Gracenote SDK to offer free mp3 encoding."

"This is an important step to make it easier for developers to access and integrate mp3 and mp3PRO technology," said Henri Linde, Vice President, New Business of Thomson's Patent and Licensing division.

The new SDK also offers a Classical Music user interface, which enables developers to offer more detailed information for classical music aficionados, including fields such as Composer, Conductor, Ensemble and Performer. The beta version of this SDK is available now, with the final production version scheduled to launch in mid-April 2003.