Thomson, the company that helped create the MP3 format, has developed a lossless version that's backwards compatible with the original.
Despite its ubiquity, MP3 is often derided by audio purists for its lossy compression scheme, which discards audio data that's less noticable to the human ear in order to achieve small file sizes. The new format, dubbed MP3HD, follows a line of lossless compression formats such as .SHN and .FLAC, but reverts to a generic MP3 file when there's no supporting codec for higher quality version.
A spokeswoman told PC Magazine that MP3HD stores its extra lossless data in id3 tags, where artist and track names are already held. MP3 players not supporting the HD format will still play the generic MP3 version.
PC Magazine also raises questions about royalties, and whether hardware manufacturers will sign on. The magazine's in-house audio analyst, Tim Gideon, said MP3HD is "basically a theoretically cool thing that can't actually be used" unless Apple, SanDisk, Samsung, Microsoft and others support the format.
I hope they do. It would be great to see lossless audio files offered through iTunes or other download services, and a backwards compatible format paves the way because there's no further conversion required to get it on an iPod or Zune. Perhaps a cunning hardware maker could even work with Thomson to allow the stripping of lossless data as it's transferred to the MP3 player, saving precious storage space while preserving high audio quality on home computers.
We'll see about all that. For now, users can download the necessary encoders from Thomson's MP3 website.
