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Thomson Releases MP3 Surround
Anonymous Howard writes "Thomson has released MP3 Surround, a new MP3 codec. They claim that MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats while maintaining backwards compatibility. Wasn't MP3 Pro supposed to be a great new MP3 codec, but never took off? I wonder if this is going to go the same route. Does anyone have a technical view of MP3 Surround? Does it have potential?"
I'm sure I read that on Slashdot before. AAC and OggVorbis have pummeled it into oblivion. Netcraft must've confirmed it, right?
Are my Slashdot stories flowing into each other again?
Wonder why people complain that redhat does not even support mp3's and switched back to Windows?
Patents are the reason and I do not want to support such a company. Do you?
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Well, with so much of the internets illegal mp3's already encoded I don't think it will take off.
I mean, theres terabytes out there in mp3 format, and it'd be too much hassle for everyone who has encoded their personal collection to this new mp3 format.
It could take off, but unlikley. If it does, there will be a mix of the two formats, traditional mp3, and this new type.
To me this codec seems more useful for programmers of games and multimedia applications then for home users.
I wanna know- does it have DRM?
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What ever happend to .ogg? I though that was spose to take over..
Once again, MP3 does what most people want it to do, and as such all the MP3 devices out there are good enough for the general public. Plus if its not backwards compatible it wont be adopted. Just accept it already. Even though i love .ogg, i dont think its ever going to take over the market in the near future, heck even sony's dropping its non-support of MP3, not just using aatrac or whatever anymore
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So does that mean I can re-encode my dvds to DiVX with surround sound? Or does that already do it now and I don't know it? Please don't mod me down, it's an earnest question.
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Kill yourself.
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mp3's surround you!
I'm not so sure surround sound *needs* MP3 compression. DVD Shrink shows movies' 5.1 DTS soundtracks using around 200 - 300MB. That's for a 1 1/2 to 2 hour movie. Not bad for 5 speaker surround, with subwoofer. Not shabby!
Is it possible that most people simply don't have surround sound on their at their computers, or just listen to MP3s using MP3-players thus rendering this codec obsolete for most?
But... what music is in surround? Probably that long hair stuff conducted by some symphony orchestra. Certainly not The Beatles ... unless yetanother version of remastered classics come out.
Screw it. I'll just go downtown and listen to some live music.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Regular people" won't pay anything extra for this... they'll only use it if it's done automatically for them. Perhaps it'll get thrown in with BluRay/HD-DVD on players, and then maybe it'll get phased in, but during that kind of a format change, you're not going to get Bob McCracken going to best buy looking for a progressive scan DVD player and looking for "MP3 Surround" on the spec sheet.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Most of the digital signal transmited on satellite are in MP2 format thats part of the DVB standard and they carry the surround sound. Dolby pro logic
Since most audio files are ripped from stereo CDs, I suppose surround-sound MP3s aren't really all that useful for most people.
I do have one quatrophonic record lying around somewhere, but since I don't have a record player, or a sound card with a four channel input, it's kind of hard to rip it to a surround sound audio format.
Hopefully, whatever technology people are using for >2 channel audio eventually trickles down to the masses. Maybe itunes or whoever will start selling surround audio files, if they don't already.
I wouldn't think that an MP3 surround format would really impact home theater systems too much. When you get into such high quality systems, lower bit rates on sounds would become very noticeable and therefore less attractive to the sound buff.
Well, I guess the DiVx community will rejoice.
This is like trying to "improve" a car that's 30 years old when instead you could just have a modern car that doesn't need to be improved. Might be a fun hobby, but doesn't make sense as business idea.
I've ripped a few music/concert DVD-Videos, downmixed to 2-channel Dolby Pro Logic--same thing you get on a 'surround sound' TV program--then encoded as MP3 and saved it in my collection. It works well enough for me. (A program called HeadAC3he will do it. Google it.) It's not real surround sound, but it sounds pretty decent on a surround sound setup. Also sounds cool on headphones.
I have no need for a special codec whose special features aren't supported by any of my hardware or software.
Doesn't the Ogg container already support multiple audio streams? Why a new format when you can put multiple streams in one container?
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MP4 would have been a better choice, if an MP* algorithm had to be used, but I would have thought that broadcast-quality codecs would have made more sense.
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Free Lossless Audio Codec is what you people should be using. Lossless audio, free, and open-source. However, I would convert some of my tracks to MP3 Surround if I had the time just for the heck of it.
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I think it sounds great. It absolutely can't provide for audiophile quality, but it still does wonders on 64-128Kbit/s bitrates. Admit it, that the one and only thing that buried it - was the stupid patenting/licensing scheme. But from a technical point of view, it left OGG/AAC/WMA a step behind.
But the AAC stream typically makes up a small percentage of the whole file size. This won't make a meaningful contribution, especially not considering you'd have to reencode (wasting time and incurring quality loss).
Unless this is going into some very popular hardware platform, it's stillborn.
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Ok, let me just say that I am a developer implementing an AAC player so I am familiar with it backwards and forwards. I am not at all familiar with MP3 per se so maybe I don't have my facts straight on MP3 itself... but AAC has some amazing features that MP3 doesn't have. Let's see, it has:
And that's just a few of them. It also has long-term prediction and so many other things. In fact the worst aspect of AAC is that it's very complicated to implement and if you turn on all these features (like long-term prediction, etc) you end up needing a lot of CPU to play it. But that is the right way to design a standard. Mobile phones three years from now are going to have Pentium II class CPUs standard, I would estimate, so we'll be able to use all the fancy features of AAC. And until then, there is AAC low-complexity.
If you want to learn a lot about AAC, check out the Audiocoding website.
Because of licensing. You have to pay a decoder license fee for each copy of the game you sell. So many of them are picking up OGG Vorbis instead. Most importantly, the Unreal Engine and now Doom 3 use them. Many games are based on the Unreal Engine and latest iD engine so it's likely to grow quite a bit.
All things being equal, they'll probably use WMA instead if they want surround music since the license is cheaper, and you don't need one on Windows (it already knows how to play them back).
People have been crowing on about the surround music revolution for ever (quadrophonic, ambisonic, DVD-A, etc) and jack and shit has ever some from it. It's always remained firmly in the enthusast domain.
This is even less likely to change given how many peopel listen on portables these days. Those do only 2-channel, so the extra is nothing but a waste of space on the drive.
I mean I love DVD-Audio disks in surround, but then I'm the only one of my friends that has ever heard one, much less owns one.
Especially since OGG Vorbis can support 255 independant channels...
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games and multimedia programmers are using ogg vorbis. because it's more efficient space-wise, sounds better, and it's free.
i don't see anyone using this for games. ever. it doesn't make sense technically and it doesn't make sense financially.
How is surround sound in my MP3 going to help me where I listen to my MP3s: on my iPod? Until they come up with a device that gives me four or five ears, I can't see the benefit in using anything besides stereo (or fancy-fied stereo with simulated surround).
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MP3Pro failed because they didn't release the standard. Only someone who bought a license could encode or decode the bitstream, and guess what, nobody bought a license. If they learned from that mistake, MP3 Surround might take off. If not, well, you know.
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You don't need a separate format for surround (unless you are itching to waste drive space and need the absolute highest quality possible). I have a great MP3 which is Pro Logic encoded, I hook my computer up to my stereo, which has a Pro Logic decoder, via a standard stereo 3.5mm mini jack -> RCA and my stereo decodes it just fine. Damn nice surround effects at that.
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Any company that uses a submarine patent is evil in my book. Well it's probably more of a bait and switch, but I already found the links.
The headphones that come with the iPod are made for people with only two ears, so I don't see the point.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The point is to recover high frequencies stripped of by low bit rate (64kbps) MP3 encoding, based on existing low frequencies and some hints on what is missing. The result is that you can listen to music radio over a 56K line. It's not great, but it will not hurt your ears. Musicmatch radio took a good advantage of this format.
But at higher bit rate high frequences are already encoded and do not have to be recovered. Given that you are not going to encode surround sound at 64kbps, MP3Pro and MP3 surround will never be used together.
I'm talking in the actual theatre here. The movie comes on film, of course. So most of the film is video, just shine a light through it, then through a lense, get a picture. Low tech. Audio is a bit more complecated:
Old analogue audio is literally two squiggly lines on one side of the film. The projector reads them much as a record player reads groves in a record, only it uses an optical senseor to change them into voltage variations. That's not used much anymore, but is still printed on all films as a backup.
Dolby Digital is printed in between the tracking hols (where the gears go to move the film) along the edge. If you look at it under a magnifier you can see a patter of dark and light, with a Dolby mark in the middle. It's the same Dolby Digital as stored on a DVD, just in an optical format (since that's what film is).
Now Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) is another digital format sotred on the film, and the newest one. It is stored on the very outer edge of the film, paste the tracking holes, and is again a light/dark optical digital pattern.
So, what about DTS? Well it was actually the first digital sound in a theatre. However their big mistake was they didn't put it on the film itself. The way it works, is it uses timecode on the film and syncs with a seperate CD player, which outputs a special stream to a DTS decoder for sound.
Now with a DVD, the DTS data is just added as another stream in the VOB files, no problem. However most movies aren't produced for DVD, they are produced for 35mm and later converted to DVD. So that presents a problem for DTS. DD is a shoein, given that it's required on all DVDs, and almost every theatre supports it. SDDS is fairly popular since lots of theares use it and it offers the best wuality. DTS though, that requires a their production and then shipping out DTS CDs. Not many theatres imploement it either, due to the extra equipment required and sync problems.
So THAT'S the reason for DTS being small. It's not disappeared, there are a fair amount of recievers that decode it and, as you noted, a good amount of DVDs have it. However it's still second fiddle to DD, and never will really make the big time.
If something does come to overtake DD, it'll probably be Windows Media Audio. Microsoft is working hard to make it the standard for digital theatre, and may suceede.