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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."
Basically it's a standard MP3 with correction delta as a binary blob in the ID3-tag. Was it really that hard to make it interleaved? Even having the correction data as a separate file, like Wavpack does it in its hybrid mode, would be better as it would make it much easier to add the files to MP3-players without using extra tools. This is just stupid. You won't be able to stream it as it's not interleaved and ID3 tags are limited to 256 MB so you can't have a MP3HD-file longer than 35 minutes or so.
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Well, the good thing about this would be that if someone actually buys a MP3 encoded this way they wouldn't be paying prime dollars for low quality lossy audio like they do now. But the bad news is that all mp3 appliances, as well as any current mp3 player that you have on your computer, will only play the low quality sound, the lossless track is rather hidden. And if you copy these mp3 files to your mp3 player, they end up wasting most of the space for something that will not be heard.
And, of course, this just muddies the waters. Some people may come to think that mp3 is decent quality (a few tracks might be), and then unknowingly buy low quality mp3 files without the extra hidden high quality track.
A far better "fix" to the problem would simply be to sell tracks in a high quality format, perhaps including a lower quality mp3 file with a lossless copy, although even if the mp3 were not included it should be able to be created as long as objectionable DRM were not part of the deal. There just seems to be no justification to packing both copies of the audio into the same file. Except, of course, as a marketing point. Lets take care of marketing right after we deal with the lawyers and politicians.
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While I don't disagree you there. More codec support is always welcome. I think there are some advantages to running lossy codecs on portable players.
1) Capacity
2) Battery Life
Capacity isn't quite where we need to be for the average person to use lossless all the time. Assuming people have roughly 1700 songs on it (A reference on Slashdot! woot!). If each mp3 song is 5megs you need an 8gig player to hold that. The lossless copy, is what? 30megs? You'd need about 50gigs to hold that same data, which is around, but not exactly mainstream yet. This problem will be mostly solved in 2-3 years.
Battery Life, might be the harder problem to solve. Cause just reading the bits and processing them with always take more energy than the lossy copies. I'm curious to know the battery life difference if anyone has done an experiment with their player? But battery life will become more important as people are integrating their mp3 players with their phones. Who cared if your iPod ran out of juice. People care a lot more when their iPhone runs out of power.
selling music and getting rid of the "which is the right format for you?" question, which would end up in support costs.
flac is of course lossless, and by definition reproduces a clone of source. it is also becomming ubiquitous. among those who care about quality or who swap bootlegs penetration is near 100%. it's a great format for these reasons. the problem is size. it's huge, on average nearly 2/3 that of a wav file. apes are slightly better, shrinking wavs to about half their size, but still quite large. really, if anything is going to unseat either flac or ape it's not going to be something even larger. it sounds as if this new mp combo file has approached 3/4 of a wav and that is just going the wrong way, paricularly since the disadvantages of girth are not offset by any corresponding advances in sound with everyday players. listeners might as well forget compression, lossless or otherwise and just go with wav files for all the good this piece of pork will do. i'm fairly certain wavs are playable on nearly every existing portable.
the world wasn't waiting for this. but a slim lossless file 1/3 the size of a wav? different story altogether.
- js.
I think an even better comparison would be a car with a helicopter stapled to the trunk. That's not even right, since the car & helicopter are more analogous to the ipod and computer. This is more like everything you would put in your car has a 10:1 scale model of itself attached to it.
Its like every shirt in Arizona having a winter coat sewn to the back of it. Closets hold 1/10 as many clothes, but big closets are getting cheaper every day. The largest suitcases barely hold enough for a weekend trip. Everyone ends up dragging around winter coats like tails, even though they rarely ever need them.
My analogy is bad, but not as bad as this hybrid mp3 format. I suppose the format is OK for archival storage, but copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.
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Not to mention there is a REASON why they are coming out with this now, and it AIN'T because they want you to have high fi MP3s. It is because the MP3 patents expire in Dec 2012 so they are hoping to get all the MP3 makers and home users switched over so they can keep drawing a check.
And the simple fact is thanks to the loudness war trying to come up with high fi MP3 is about as pointless as coming up with a super polished turd. The extra bitrate will NOT be any better than the 320k we have now, simply because the source material is so shitty. In fact most folks I know use 128K VBR because they can't tell the difference. So don't be fooled, this is NOT to make your music sound better. It is so they can keep MP3 compression under patents for another 20+ years. I don't know about you but I would rather stick to good old MP3 and wait to see what kind of cool new gadgets come out in 2013 when the patents pass. Plus having legal Linux support is a nice bonus too.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just keep all your FLAC files on PC or NAS, and when you want to load them on a player, copy them from the MP3FS directory.
You don't need to keep duplicate lossy files around, and you don't have huge chunks of lossless music taking up space on a player that can't play them anyway.