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."

Comments

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?

[MightyMartian]

So let's see. It's like a car with helicopter blades, except the helicopter blades don't turn, but now you take up both lanes of traffic.

Re:why?

[fm6]

I think a better comparison would be a helicopter that can also drive down the street. As if the convenience of not having to switch to a car outweighed the risk of accidentally decapitating pedestrians.

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?

[Chyeld]

As if the convenience of not having to switch to a car outweighed the risk of accidentally decapitating pedestrians.

Accidentally?

Re:why?

[JoeMerchant]

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

Unless you sell flash memory.

Re:why?

[hairyfeet]

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.

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?

The obvious problem

[pxc]

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.

The problems

At face value it's remarkably convenient, like a car that doubles up as a plane. But like your aeromobile, there are problems for the average consumer. Firstly, file size. A normal 320Kbps MP3 of the same Pink Floyd song was just 14.6MB, and 320Kbps is all you'll hear if you listen to an mp3HD track on your iPod.

But the lossless audio stored in the file will be stored on your iPod nevertheless, taking up precious storage space. (Although we should point out to audiophiles that the hybrid files are smaller than the combined size of a FLAC and 320Kbps MP3, although are less efficient to encode than FLAC.)

I don't really see to whom this will be a valuable technology--audiophiles will probably have a large enough music collection that they don't see the benefit in taking up 10x as much space on their portable device, and are probably capable of reencoding when they transfer (some media players can do this automatically). Most everyone else just listens to low quality Limewire rips on their PC anyway.

Anyone here think they would really want to use this format? (genuine question)

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

Re:I'll wait for the MP3-HHD-DVVDD-BVD format.

[aliquis]

The chinese companies already have MP5 players ;)

The stupidest format ever!

[Per Wigren]

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.

Re:I'll wait for the MP3-HHD-DVVDD-BVD format.

[corsec67]

Wouldn't an MP5 player not be usable in many countries?

Learn with history or make the same mistakes.

[Volanin]

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
or a new mp3PRO file, since they both used the same file extension. Maybe if they had renamed
the extension to .mp3pro or something like that, the mp3PRO format might have had some chance...

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
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 .mp3hd or something similar.

I hope I am wrong, but this surely spells doom to me.

Re:transpire?

[Lemmy Caution]

Isn't a transpire a male vampire who dresses like a female vampire?

It's all in the name

[ray_mccrae]

I predict this will be a raging success on the scale of JPEG2000

Re:The only loss...

[PopeRatzo]

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

H&K

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

That MP5 format is really bad for your ears.

Re:H&K

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Headless AND lossy

A Far Less Brain-Damaged Solution (for Linux)

[Spasmodeus]

...is MP3FS, a virtual file system that transcodes your FLAC files to MP3 on the fly (including metadata).

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.