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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."
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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?
that you probably thought of when you read the summary ("So now I get a larger-than-FLAC sized file on my portable player so I can get 128kbps?") is acknowledged in TFA.
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.
The chinese companies already have MP5 players ;)
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.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Wouldn't an MP5 player not be usable in many countries?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
is more FLAC support in portables. Problem solved more elegantly and without yet more proprietary codecs.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Relevant hydrogenaudio thread: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=55b656dc8cdb3b97da794e936b2a9b1d&showtopic=70548
In summary, it seems like a fairly useless and poorly thought out format. To be clear, this WILL NOT play losslessly in a standard mp3 player, you must use a special decoder to get the lossless bit. It will only play the lossy component in a normal mp3 player.
Lossless information stored in id3v2 tags? Bad hack that will break just about every tagging program out there. File sizes much larger than real lossless codecs and encoding/decoding speed is much slower than flac. Also you can't have tracks longer than about an hour due to id3v2 size limits. Additionally, a full size flac file and 256kbit mp3 often comes in at a SMALLER size than this one monolithic hacked up mp3.
Nothing to see here people, this is a waste of time. Something like lossy/lossless wavpack hybrid is a much better solution.
Sam
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
I dare say that this insistence on backward compatibility is going to kill this format.
If anyone still remembers, many years ago Thomson released the mp3PRO format.
It was a low bitrate MP3 with some added spectral band data that could recreate the original
music sound quality. So in theory, you could have the same quality for half the bitrate/size.
To my decaying ears, it sounded really good at the time... if played on the supported players.
But when you played these files in any unsupported player, which happened to be all of them
except for the Thomson's Player or the Thomson's Winamp Plugin, you ended up listening to
a HORRIBLE low bitrate sound quality, since the extra mp3PRO information was ignored.
And even worse: you had no way of telling if a file being downloaded was an original mp3 file .mp3pro or something like that, the mp3PRO format might have had some chance...
or a new mp3PRO file, since they both used the same file extension. Maybe if they had renamed
the extension to
Years pass... and now they are doing the same thing again.
Instead of focusing on a lossless mp3 codec for a specific kind of market/enthusiast, they are .mp3hd or something similar.
insisting in keeping backward compatibility with players using the same method as mp3PRO did.
And once more the files are going to have the same extension as the original ones, instead
of
I hope I am wrong, but this surely spells doom to me.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
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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To Thompson I would say you had your chance with rubbish MP3, so FLAC off!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Isn't a transpire a male vampire who dresses like a female vampire?
Does this mean that they're abandoning the mp3pro format? And just as it was about to finally catch on, too....
This guy's the limit!
I predict this will be a raging success on the scale of JPEG2000
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?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
This is completely dumb, but if it finally makes LOSSLESS digital music stores a reality (that have no DRM and are not watermarked), I'm all for it!
Didn't RTFA (duh), but I wonder what codec they use for the lossless part? Not that I care, since I would transcode that to FLAC before I even played it.
When you can define "fair compensation", we can start to worry about whether or not artists are getting it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Oh, yes, lets tweak this patent just a tad and see if we can extend it for another 20 years.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
http://007.blogbrasil.com.br/mp10-player/
The device is an Mp10 player, it has built-in all the features of previous devices, that means, inside the mp10 there are an mp3, mp4, mp5, mp6, mp7, mp8 and mp9.
Someone from work one explained to me. Each feature, like a camera, mobile analogic TV, digital TV, fmRadio, etc. Each feature adds 1 to MpX.
That MP5 format is really bad for your ears.
Sounds like evergreening to me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening
There is plenty of music still being recorded with reasonable mastering and EQ. Sure, most popular stuff is really annoyingly loud, but that music tends to be crap anyway (IMO). Also, there was a ton of music which was recorded before the loudness wars really 'started'.
If all you like are top40 hits, I think the loudness is the least of your concerns. Them music is so simple that you're not missing out on much.
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.
Wouldn't an MP5 player not be usable in many countries?
Oh it's usable. Without a doubt. In fact, my problem is that once I started using it, I had to keep using it until everyone stopped complaining about me using it.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
This is like a car with two motors. One motor is street legal and can be driven in all fifty states. The second is a fully modified fire-breathing 800HP monster that can only be used in closed-course racing.
This is an apt comparison - the extra weight of the street legal motor will ensure that you lose every race you compete in.
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