Singapore – Soundbuzz, an online and mobile music company, has launched Asia’s first online store to offer high fidelity songs with technology support from Exploit Technologies. The store utilizes the Scalable-to-Lossless (SLS) technology to allow consumers to purchase a standard quality song, and then ‘top up’ to receive a high audio fidelity (lossless) version of the song at a later date. Consumers can also synchronize the purchased music to mobile handsets. Standard quality files (256 kbps) are available for S$2.50 (US$1.75) while high fidelity files cost S$3.00 (US$2.10). The top up from standard quality files costs S$0.80 (US$0.55). The store is the result of a partnership between Soundbuzz and Exploit Technologies, the marketing and commercialization arm of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), supported by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). The SLS technology was developed by the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), an institute under A*STAR. SLS is an MPEG4 audio standard capable of compressing music files including CD tracks for playback without any loss in fidelity. It also allows for fine-grain pre-encoding of music files at different bitrates to allow streaming or playback at different quality, depending on the device type or available channel bandwidth.