Thomson Releases MP3 Surround

Anonymous Howard writes "Thomson has released MP3 Surround, a new MP3 codec. They claim that MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats while maintaining backwards compatibility. Wasn't MP3 Pro supposed to be a great new MP3 codec, but never took off? I wonder if this is going to go the same route. Does anyone have a technical view of MP3 Surround? Does it have potential?"

Once again....

[detritus`]

Once again, MP3 does what most people want it to do, and as such all the MP3 devices out there are good enough for the general public. Plus if its not backwards compatible it wont be adopted. Just accept it already. Even though i love .ogg, i dont think its ever going to take over the market in the near future, heck even sony's dropping its non-support of MP3, not just using aatrac or whatever anymore

Hmmm

[blackmonday]

I'm not so sure surround sound *needs* MP3 compression. DVD Shrink shows movies' 5.1 DTS soundtracks using around 200 - 300MB. That's for a 1 1/2 to 2 hour movie. Not bad for 5 speaker surround, with subwoofer. Not shabby!

Re:No

[Zeal17]

It won't replace current mp3s. It will only be a method of compressing 5.1 channel surround sound files. It will only be useful for ripping DVD audio, or attaching it to DVD movies that have been compressed with divx or something.

DVB signals

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the digital signal transmited on satellite are in MP2 format thats part of the DVB standard and they carry the surround sound. Dolby pro logic

Dolby Pro Logic anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've ripped a few music/concert DVD-Videos, downmixed to 2-channel Dolby Pro Logic--same thing you get on a 'surround sound' TV program--then encoded as MP3 and saved it in my collection. It works well enough for me. (A program called HeadAC3he will do it. Google it.) It's not real surround sound, but it sounds pretty decent on a surround sound setup. Also sounds cool on headphones.

I have no need for a special codec whose special features aren't supported by any of my hardware or software.

Re:No

[FuzzzyLogik]

key here is that mp3 surround is backwards compatible.. meaning the new stuff could be encoded in mp3 surround. not that any cd's you get right now take advantage of surround sound anyway so it's worthless i think (correct me if i'm wrong)... but i think SACD and DVD-Audio do support surround sound so that's always an option for using this and maintaining the surround sound in the encoded format

Re:MPEG4 (DiVX, Xvid) with surround sound?

[Jherek Carnelian]

Typically the video is re-encoded and stereo audio gets turned into mp3 or ogg.

If the audio track is multichannel, it is usually just preserved in the original encoding. AC3 (Dolby Digital) is usually either 384Kbps or 448Kbps on the DVD and DTS is usually 768Kbps with the rare 1.5Mbps track.

Ogg vorbis does have provision for multichannel sound, up to (I think) 255 channels. I have not looked for over a year, but none of the encoders or decoders supported more than 2-channel ogg back then.

Re:Once again....

[zurab]

Plus if its not backwards compatible it wont be adopted.

Said an immediately modde up 5-digit /. poster without having read as much as a second sentence of the blurb which says:

They claim that MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats while maintaining backwards compatibility.

That's the second sentence for crying out loud. The article itself, which nobody could ever be asked to read before commenting or moderating, says:

At the same time, the new format offers complete backward compatibility to any existing mp3 software and hardware devices.

For the audio codec impaired, MP3 Pro [mp3-tech.org] that's mentioned in the blurb is MP3 + SBR [codingtechnologies.com]. If you want to use SBR, which has more to do with guessing and reconstruting the sound rather than compression, then you are probably much better off using AAC + SBR. That's one of the reasons, as far as I can tell, why the MP3 Pro never "took off."

Re:Screw em

[Billly Gates]

But there are free altenatives like Ogg/vorbis. Why not support them?

Besides Thompson let Linux and others have it for free until it saturated the market then pulled the plug and demanded ownership of standard audio. Pretty sleazy in my book.

Re:It could be used in games.

[batkiwi]

Usually a game sound is mono, and the sound engine renders it's position using some 3d sound API. Except for a cutscene, you'd never use a surround encoded sound.

While you could "cheat" using this and have, say, 16 mp3s of a gunshot from 16 radials around the listener, I still don't see it as being that helpful.

Games are going largely OGG Vorbis

[Sycraft-fu]

Because of licensing. You have to pay a decoder license fee for each copy of the game you sell. So many of them are picking up OGG Vorbis instead. Most importantly, the Unreal Engine and now Doom 3 use them. Many games are based on the Unreal Engine and latest iD engine so it's likely to grow quite a bit.

All things being equal, they'll probably use WMA instead if they want surround music since the license is cheaper, and you don't need one on Windows (it already knows how to play them back).

not really.

[bani]

games and multimedia programmers are using ogg vorbis. because it's more efficient space-wise, sounds better, and it's free.

i don't see anyone using this for games. ever. it doesn't make sense technically and it doesn't make sense financially.

Re:MP3 is dead, right?

[Trogre]

It is where I come from. Those of us who have had any clue about Thomsons patent claims and licences has stayed the hell away from mp3 for years.

Sure, it means having to pay extra for those portable players that support ogg vorbis but you get better sound quality for the same bitrate, or (looking at it the other way) can store nearly twice as much music at the same quality.

headphones?

[cheesekeeper]

How is surround sound in my MP3 going to help me where I listen to my MP3s: on my iPod? Until they come up with a device that gives me four or five ears, I can't see the benefit in using anything besides stereo (or fancy-fied stereo with simulated surround).

Not useful for encoding music/ only for DIVX

[Anonymous Coward]

Surround sound MP3 will be an utter flop in the consumer market.

DIVX:
As others have pointed out, this *could* be a potential replacement for surround sound AC3 when ecoding DIVX movies. That being said, AC3 is a damn good format, there had better be serious advantages to make anyone switch.

PORTABLE DEVICES:
iPods and their wannabes all use stereo .125 inch headphone jacks that simply cannot take advantage of those other audio tracks.

Moreover, as these new files have 5 tracks, they will take more processing power and more battery power in order to play a song that will (in the end) still only be in stereo.

AUDIO RIPPING:
The only conceivable use for compressing multi-channel audio for PC use would be to compress DVD-Audio dics or SuperAudio discs. However, both of these formats have copy protection schemes...and (unlike the loveable CD) they have the engineering room to come up with new copy protection schemes.

...No need

[Hobadee]

You don't need a separate format for surround (unless you are itching to waste drive space and need the absolute highest quality possible). I have a great MP3 which is Pro Logic encoded, I hook my computer up to my stereo, which has a Pro Logic decoder, via a standard stereo 3.5mm mini jack -> RCA and my stereo decodes it just fine. Damn nice surround effects at that.

mp3pro is for dialup users

[iamacat]

The point is to recover high frequencies stripped of by low bit rate (64kbps) MP3 encoding, based on existing low frequencies and some hints on what is missing. The result is that you can listen to music radio over a 56K line. It's not great, but it will not hurt your ears. Musicmatch radio took a good advantage of this format.

But at higher bit rate high frequences are already encoded and do not have to be recovered. Given that you are not going to encode surround sound at 64kbps, MP3Pro and MP3 surround will never be used together.

Sorry, should have been more specific

[Sycraft-fu]

I'm talking in the actual theatre here. The movie comes on film, of course. So most of the film is video, just shine a light through it, then through a lense, get a picture. Low tech. Audio is a bit more complecated:

Old analogue audio is literally two squiggly lines on one side of the film. The projector reads them much as a record player reads groves in a record, only it uses an optical senseor to change them into voltage variations. That's not used much anymore, but is still printed on all films as a backup.

Dolby Digital is printed in between the tracking hols (where the gears go to move the film) along the edge. If you look at it under a magnifier you can see a patter of dark and light, with a Dolby mark in the middle. It's the same Dolby Digital as stored on a DVD, just in an optical format (since that's what film is).

Now Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) is another digital format sotred on the film, and the newest one. It is stored on the very outer edge of the film, paste the tracking holes, and is again a light/dark optical digital pattern.

So, what about DTS? Well it was actually the first digital sound in a theatre. However their big mistake was they didn't put it on the film itself. The way it works, is it uses timecode on the film and syncs with a seperate CD player, which outputs a special stream to a DTS decoder for sound.

Now with a DVD, the DTS data is just added as another stream in the VOB files, no problem. However most movies aren't produced for DVD, they are produced for 35mm and later converted to DVD. So that presents a problem for DTS. DD is a shoein, given that it's required on all DVDs, and almost every theatre supports it. SDDS is fairly popular since lots of theares use it and it offers the best wuality. DTS though, that requires a their production and then shipping out DTS CDs. Not many theatres imploement it either, due to the extra equipment required and sync problems.

So THAT'S the reason for DTS being small. It's not disappeared, there are a fair amount of recievers that decode it and, as you noted, a good amount of DVDs have it. However it's still second fiddle to DD, and never will really make the big time.

If something does come to overtake DD, it'll probably be Windows Media Audio. Microsoft is working hard to make it the standard for digital theatre, and may suceede.