New Lossless MP3 Format Explained

CNETNate writes "Thomson, the company that licenses the MP3 patent, has released a new lossless MP3 format called mp3HD. It utilises both lossless and lossy audio contained inside a single .mp3 file, and the files will play on all existing MP3 players. The idea is simple: lossless files on your desktop that can be transferred without conversion to iPods and MP3 players. The issue, it transpires, is that although the full lossless/lossy hybrid MP3 file is transferred to players, only the lossy element can be played back. A command line encoder can be found on Thomson's Web site."

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why?

[Reality Master 201]

So, it's a container format with two different data streams in it, and you can stuff massively oversized files on your portable player, only you can only play the itty bity portion of that file that's the lossy one.

And the use case for this is?

Re:why?

[aliquis]

And why put the MP3 part there at all? Why would you need it if you already have a lossless file?

If you transfer it to a player not capable of playing the lossless file it doesn't make sense to store it all over there, so converting it to a lossy only file is the way to do it, and well, you can do that while transferring the file ... ... but then using "MP3" and their technology doesn't make sense at all since there already exist plenty of lossless formats and one compressed one would be enough.

It would had been enough if they had made an app which hooked into Windows file copying to UMS devices and encoded any lossless formats into MP3 during the transfer.

All in all, yes, it's useless, and a stupid idea.
(And if you already have a lossless file while not convert to something like AAC or OGG instead?)

Re:why?

[TheGratefulNet]

the use-case is probably some kind of lock-in, either now or later. or licensing fees. or NEW fees.

yup, sounds like container when a container is NOT needed. keeping dual copies makes sense (I do this, I have mp3 and flac of the same file but in diff subdirs) and when I'm home, I play from ./flac and when I'm away, I copied files from ./mp3 to the device. time to encode is still slow so I keep pre-encoded copies on my farm.

but putting flac in a portable and not being able to use it.

dumb. really dumb.

no, no use case. not for us, anyway. there might be a use-case for people making money from this, but not for us users.

Re:why?

[wiredlogic]

MP3 by itself is not a container format. It is a raw data stream designed for handling realtime audio processing. It sounds like this is more like a "hacked" MP3 with special invalid frames tacked on to the end with difference data, similar to the way ID3v2 tags and album art are embedded.

Re:why?

[drolli]

Exactly.

which fraction of the population are non-idiots, according to your definition?

Re:why?

[JoeMerchant]

...copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.

Unless you sell flash memory.

Re:why?

[tobiasly]

the use-case is probably some kind of lock-in, either now or later. or licensing fees. or NEW fees.

Lock-in? New fees? C'mon, let's get serious. They're giving away the encoder for free on their website! Do you really think that the company that owns the MP3 format would just let this new format, crappy though it is, be used by enough people so that it becomes a de-facto standard and then decide to start enforcing their IP and try to wring money out of something that already has numerous superior free implementations?

This is useless.

[twitchingbug]

Great. I'll have 80% of the capacity of my MP3 player used up by bits I will never access. Great job solving the problem fellas.

Re:This is useless.

[m0rbidini]

No really. It is useless and a lousy hack. It's just a way for Thomson and FhG to further milk the mp3 buzzword, one more time.

Useless format:
        * The lossless part is stored in ID3v2 tags.
        * Size of ID3v2 tags is limited to 256MB by specifications; as a result, lossless part of an mp3hd file can't be larger than 256MB.

Addendum:
Current tagging software isn't prepared to deal with this kind of situation, so you're going to see various disturbing behaviors such as:
        * Very slow tag updates (near-full-file-rewrite with each edit).
        * Heavy memory usage of tag editors.
        * Retagging stripping correction data.
        * Tag editing or even reading failures when approaching the 256MB limit because software will try to put each ID3v2 frame in a single memory block and allocating a single block of such size is likely to fail in 32-bit address space because of fragmentation issues.

From: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=70548

All we need...

[mister_playboy]

is more FLAC support in portables. Problem solved more elegantly and without yet more proprietary codecs.

Why?

[ColaMan]

My P-133 could do better than real time encoding of .wav -> .mp3

So why, when computers are now routinely 50 or 60 times faster than that, would I bother with two separate file formats crammed into one blob on the relatively tiny memory of my portable device?

Why, when disk space is now so cheap on my pc, can't I have a simple background process converting .flac into.mp3, to be stored separately for transfer to my portable device?

Why would I suddenly want to put up with 9/10th's of the storage capacity of my portable device being used for useless data?

In short, what the fuck were they thinking?

Re:The only loss...

[PopeRatzo]

When you can define "fair compensation", we can start to worry about whether or not artists are getting it.

Re:I'm the only one that thinks this is a good ide

[yuna49]

My reply is why bother supporting a proprietary format to incorporate lossless audio when there's already a well-developed open standard already, namely FLAC? By your argument, the expansion of disk space makes lossless storage more attractive. I agree with that, but what I don't want is for everyone to hop on board another standard from Thomson and friends which can't legally be supported in free and open software.

Forward-thinking companies like COWON support open formats like FLAC and Matroska. Other players should as well. We've all suffered long enough with proprietary formats that bring nothing extra to the table other than the marketing power of large corporate backers.