I have a lot of enthusiasm for a technical initiative our team is preparing to launch.   Usually, we think of high quality audio files as being large in size and needing to sacrifice quality in order to be made smaller.  From our beginning, InfraWare has used WMA files for playback by transcriptionists in the InfraWare Transcription Client (ITC).  Those are highly compressed files that sound pretty good.  End of story?  Not for our engineers. 

For over a year, they have been laying the groundwork for a dramatic improvement, and the time is finally near.  Beginning soon, they will be changing the codec (a technical term for describing how a WMA or other audio file is encoded and decoded by Windows) for the better.  The new codec will sound better and be 75% smaller.  That means jobs will download in only 25% of the time that they have taken in the past.  Now that's innovation!

In the big picture, regular WMA files like the ones we employ today use a well rounded encoding that is suitable for voice and music.  The new encoding will focus only on the audio spectrum used by voice.  By ignoring the audio range not used by voice, this new encoding does a better job of capturing great quality voice in an even smaller size.  Customers who have tested this process have been delighted with both the improved transaction speed and the sound of the playback.  The implementation of this new codec has taken a long time because many components of the platform have had to be upgraded to prepare for the change.  The release of the ITC 2009 was the last major update.  It is a real pleasure to see things become better, faster, cheaper.