Fraunhofer IGD's research in audio transmission focuses on minimizing loss of information in speech connections over the Internet while providing high quality for music transmission. This work encompasses the following four areas:

· High quality transmission of speech and music
· Advanced compression and transmission schemes
· Avoiding data loss and drop-outs
· Spatial audio for VR applications

Applications will be presented where scalable codecs and techniques for processing data loss are integrated. WAU (wavelet audio unit) is a WebPhone application for high quality audio communication. WAM (wavelet audio & music) consists of a client-server solution for broadcasting and receiving music via the Internet. Also described will be a multi-party audio toolkit providing spatial audio output. This has been integrated in IGD's Virtual Collaborative Environment which allows conferences for multiple users in a shared three dimensional environments, by navigating their avatars. The VCE prototype has been tested in various transatlantic conferences using ATM connections as well as public networks, like the Internet.