MP3 goes lossless

Lossless audio codecs have never been, and never will be supported by the content owners. (RIAA) The hardware makers are therefore afraid to support it lest they bring the ire of the RIAA upon themselves. FLAC support is a good example. Lossless codecs are seen as a medium for piracy.

Sounds like it's going to mean bigger than necessary files. In order for legacy devices to "play the generic mp3 version", the file must contain a compressed version in addition to a lossless version. Pointless. Just add flac and Monkey's Audio support to the players.

No, its not pointless for us who prefer losseless audio and don't care about file size !

Forgive my ignorance, since I refuse to install iTunes until absolultely necessary... I thought all iTunes songs were already available in Apples losseless format on the iTunes store ?

Or can you only rip CDs to Apple's lossless format ?

We already have lossless packing for PCM, FLAC and MLP. We don't have a use for yet another codec UNLESS the main goal to to enable yet more DRM. Although MLP already supports DRM. So the real question is what could this be used for? I can't think of a thing, we already have wav and PCM format, MP3HD adds nothing to the mix except potential DRM.

Sounds like how the new HD audio codecs for blu-ray work. i.e. DTS core + extra encoding that makes it HD if your player/receiver can understand it.

There's a problem with the correction data size - if it exceeds a certain size then the file cannot be losslessly preserved.

Oh, and more devices currently support FLAC.

For one mp3HD?? Who came up with that stupid tag. Two, they already have several lossless compression schemes, ie FLAC, APE, MLS, Optimum Frog, ALAC, so why do we need another one? This sounds like they are going to DRM the hell out of this one. No thanks, I will pass.

I don't see any mention of DRM, so I don't know why everyone is jumping to that conclusion. If the files are backwards compatible with existing MP3 players, it might be hard to attach an effective DRM scheme onto them. I could see why this new format would be advantageous.

1) The masses of non-technical audio consumers are very familiar with "MP3" and are more likely to go with a format they are familiar with. Most people have no idea what FLAC is.

2) It is backwards compatible with all existing MP3 players (almost all existing audio devices?) that don't support the lossless format, so it would likely have very few customer complaints or support issues.

3) Thomson is obviously trying to extend their MP3 money-train by expanding the format to handle higher quality audio. They will probably make out good with additional licensing fees on this new format.

Can someone explain what the HD stands for in MP3HD? everything is getting labelled HD now and it is becoming meaningless and actually kind of annoying.

Maybe in this case it is short for HypeD.

I've been following this at hydrogenaudio and it seems liek there are a few flaws with this already..

First off it's not lossy+lossless file it's a lossy+correction so the filesize technically shouldn't be that much bigger and the more bitrate used for the original MP3 means less correction. The correction portion is stored in the ID3 tag so the correction size is limited to 256 MB by the ID3 standard. On top of this, any careless tag editor will quickly remove the correction portion (both foobar2000 and winamp do this with _any_ tag update) or users will be faced with very slow tag updates.

Why would manufacturers want to pay extra royalty on this crap when FLAC is free?

@ Crappy, yes its HypeD alright.

two files to make one audio file makes no sense to me. seems like a pain in the a**.

You actually believe the lossless audio portion ISNT going to be DRM'd to death? You are living in a dream world.

Well! James old boy. Welcome back dude! Long time no see.

I agree with Crabby, HypeD should be what the HD stands for.

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon with my pitchfork (like I intended), I just decided to test it out first.

Could use a GUI, sounds just as good as FLAC & APE, file size is consistently larger than FLAC, but not by much, maybe a MB or 2.

If you try a tag editor, other than WinAmp, it strips the HD portion out & leaves you with the base lossy ver.

Maybe mp3tag &/or other tag editors will add support for this format in time.

For now, I think I'll just stand on the sidelines & see what happens. (with my pitchfork & ready to light torch in hand)

r_saotome:

Awesome. Thanks for the research! It's a good point about the id3 stripping issue. Could be a big problem.

I don't see this gaining any traction. Anyone remember mp3pro...see how that format worked out.

Ok did some research and here are my findings on this format.

The original wav file was 3:29 minutes in length and is stereo at 44.1Khz. Its size is 36,780,620 bytes before anything is done.

Conversion to Flac lvl 8 the file size is 29,087,203 bytes.

Conversion to APE Insane lvl the file size is 28,446,356 bytes.

Conversion to Mp3HD (Mp3 encoded at 320K CBR) the file size is
32,144,241 bytes

Flac compression 20.92%
APE compression 22.66%
Mp3HD compression 12.61%

Foobar 2000 was used for the Flac conversion using the Flac command line encoder. APE conversion was done through the Monkey Audio GUI. Mp3HD conversion was done through All4mp3 tools on site.

The Flac and Mp3HD encoded about the same speed. The APE file took considerably longer but had the better compression of the 3.

I tested the Mp3HD file in Winamp with the plugin provided on All4mp3. The plugin has a configurable menu that can be popped up when a Mp3HD track is played to ask the user which portion of the file to play, lossless or lossy. So after confirming that, I decoded the Mp3HD file back to wav and loaded it and the original wav up in Foobar2000 and did a binary comparison. The files were exactly the same so the Mp3HD format did what it said it would do.

My final thoughts, I think it is really pointless. Mp3 is for portability and you pretty much blow that out of the ball park having a lossless portion added to file size. Lossless compression is mainly for archival purposes or to be listened to at home. I did encode the wav file to a mp3 320 CBR with Lame and the file was 8MB in size. So it does have an advantage of being smaller if you took into consideration mp3+lossless from each format. However, like I said before, it kind of defeats the purpose what mp3 is for so why do it in the first place? Better to keep your lossless copy at home and use your mp3 copy for whatever on the go.

1 further thing I would like to add...in WinAmp, I just left the dll in the plug-in folder, come to find out, that it doesn't play nice with the Logitech G15 keyboard...basically, it disables the ability to unpause a song using the keyboards multimedia buttons at the top. So if you manually unpause the song in WinAmp, it will constantly restart the song at the beginning.

This is with ANY MP3 file, not just the HD lossless ones.

Removing the dll from the plug-in folder, restored the G15's multimedia unpause button to normal working order.

TISK, TISK...

A good idea to quickly fill up all those new terabyte-class drives. And here I thought I'd be able to have "lossy MP3"-sized lossless audio on my portable audio device - disappointing really. I'd rather have the lossless HD aspect separate from the lossy part and have an option to easily transcode to a lossy version when syncing to my portable device, but as it is now it's a total waste of space.

im still waiting for the new MP3 format promised by the people who made MP3, they claimed around 2002/2003 the new MP3 will be 10% the size of a MP3 file but offer the same quality sound. i still remember the artlicle,and nearly 9 years later, its still not out.

im still waiting for the new MP3 format promised by the people who made MP3, they claimed around 2002/2003 the new MP3 will be 10% the size of a MP3 file but offer the same quality sound. i still remember the artlicle,and nearly 9 years later, its still not out.