BOB & BARN'S CHRISTMAS GIFT TO GAME AUDIO!

Nov 20th 2006, for immediate release:

For years, sound designers, musicians and audio programmers working in the games industry have been plagued by a stupidly simple, but maddeningly frustrating problem. In order to avoid glitches with looped

samples, they have had to sit, often for hours on end, manually calculating the length of each individual sample - a task that has to be repeated for each games platform it is applied to. A time consuming, soul-destroying

task. Until now.

For award-winning composers and audio wizards Bob & Barn - in-house music and sound design supervisors at leading audio production company Side, and BAFTA nominated for their epic scoring of Sony's Primal - the frustration finally proved too much. 'We spend the major part of our lives working on game audio, and having to waste hours on this mindless activity - especially when the pressure is on and time is short - just seemed crazy. Ultimately we have ended up avoiding the use of hundreds of looping samples to avoid the issue.'

Rather than simply wait for someone else to come up with a permanent solution, however, they set about looking for one themselves. Now, with the aid of a doctor of digital signal processing from Cambridge University, they've not only found the answer - they've made it available to long-suffering colleagues around the world.

The fix - called Reloop - comes in the form of a plugin for Soundforge, which, when installed, modifies samples and allows them to conform to what are known as 'byte boundaries'. Byte boundaries are, essentially, a precise length into which a looped sample in a console system must fit in order to function correctly - and that means every sample's length must be an exact multiple of a unique number inherent in each platform. Failure to comply means dodgy, clicking audio. But Reloop does away with all the tedious work and performs the task effortlessly.

This really comes into its own when you realise the potential of using it to conform samples on ALL platforms with one magic number negating the need to use different versions of the same file for each platform.

Cambridge University boffin Dylan Menzies, who spent six months perfecting the algorithms for Bob and Barn at Zenprobe Software, explains: 'Reloop incorporates an advanced signal processing design that modifies the whole loop rather than using the conventional approach that can generate noticeable artefacts. The result is a plugin that will operate seamlessly within the Soundforge batch processing framework.'

A free demo of the Reloop plugin can be downloaded immediately from www.bobandbarn.com/reloop with full licenses available online at a LIMITED INTRODUCTORY PRICE for both single and multiple users.

For more info, contact:

Andrew Barnabas

Side Cambridge

124 Malvern Rd.

Cambridge

CB1 9LH

UK

01223 524018

barn@sideuk.com