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?"

Surround

[SirChris]

Do i have to remix all my movies now?

Screw em

[Billly Gates]

Wonder why people complain that redhat does not even support mp3's and switched back to Windows?

Patents are the reason and I do not want to support such a company. Do you?

MPEG4 (DiVX, Xvid) with surround sound?

[Linuxathome]

So does that mean I can re-encode my dvds to DiVX with surround sound? Or does that already do it now and I don't know it? Please don't mod me down, it's an earnest question.

CDs are stereo, this won't catch on for awhile

[j1m+5n0w]

Since most audio files are ripped from stereo CDs, I suppose surround-sound MP3s aren't really all that useful for most people.

I do have one quatrophonic record lying around somewhere, but since I don't have a record player, or a sound card with a four channel input, it's kind of hard to rip it to a surround sound audio format.

Hopefully, whatever technology people are using for >2 channel audio eventually trickles down to the masses. Maybe itunes or whoever will start selling surround audio files, if they don't already.

Would this have impact on home theater systems?

[cbw82]

I wouldn't think that an MP3 surround format would really impact home theater systems too much. When you get into such high quality systems, lower bit rates on sounds would become very noticeable and therefore less attractive to the sound buff.

Well, I guess the DiVx community will rejoice.

Re:Hmmm

[MukiMuki]

Yeah, but DTS sounds like crap at that size compared to what mp3 would. DTS isn't designed to go 750kbits, it's kind of a hack they added later. Which is unfortunate, because now people can end up with bad DTS tracks. (to be quite honest, 640kbits AC3 sounds a lot better than 750kbits DTS. DTS just sounds nicer 'cause it's usually twice that.)

MP3 surround will be very similar to AC3, only with less restrictive Dolby Digital crap. (give Thomson/Frauhenhour all the crap you want, but they've been pretty nice about licensing compared to DD/DTS/anyone save for OGG.)

What this is DEFINITELY going to lead to, however, is the cracking of CSS-2 for DVD-a's. Finally, surround sound in a GOOD format~! ^_^

Re:It could be used in games.

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmers of games and multimedia applciations need to pay a license fee to use MP3. Probably even more for this one. That's why a lot of them have been taking up Ogg Vorbis.

Does Ogg do this?

[Matt Perry]

Doesn't the Ogg container already support multiple audio streams? Why a new format when you can put multiple streams in one container?

Re:OGG

[eddy]

What happened? I'm using it for all my music, and most game developers are using it for both music and sound-fx. Machinae Supremacy [machinaesupremacy.com] are still releasing songs in Vorbis, etc, etc.

Try the tuned aoTuV version [hydrogenaudio.org] at q -2 and up.

FLAC is where it's at.

[MHobbit]

Free Lossless Audio Codec is what you people should be using. Lossless audio, free, and open-source. However, I would convert some of my tracks to MP3 Surround if I had the time just for the heck of it.

Re:Alternative to AC3

[eddy]

But the AAC stream typically makes up a small percentage of the whole file size. This won't make a meaningful contribution, especially not considering you'd have to reencode (wasting time and incurring quality loss).

Unless this is going into some very popular hardware platform, it's stillborn.

Re:Screw Potential!

[That's Unpossible!]

I wanna know- does it have DRM?

That doesn't really matter. AAC doesn't "have" DRM either, but that doesn't stop Apple from using DRM with AAC (aka FairPlay).

It really depends on the company distributing the MP3.

The more relevant question is does it have licensing fees and patents encumbering it? I'm sure it does. Though that never really stopped MP3.

AAC

[ChiralSoftware]

Yes, AAC is controlled in just the same way that MP3 is. When they were designing MPEG4 to replace the aging MPEG2, they also needed a new audio standard. The designed what was called a non-backwards compatible standard, which is AAC. If you want to "fix" MP3, you end up with AAC, which is an excellent standard.

Ok, let me just say that I am a developer implementing an AAC player so I am familiar with it backwards and forwards. I am not at all familiar with MP3 per se so maybe I don't have my facts straight on MP3 itself... but AAC has some amazing features that MP3 doesn't have. Let's see, it has:

• Perceptual noise shaping (PNS): Noise can be sent just by labeling it as "noise" without having to accurately encode it.
• Temporal noise shaping (TNS): Information can be concentrated where it is needed.
• Different window lengths: long vs. short, so that areas where there is rapid signal change can be encoded with more information.
• Gain control: Enhance the dynamic range.
• Kaiser-Bessel windowing: More optimal than the sine windowing which I think MP3 is limited to. Oh, and it can switch between the two, also.

And that's just a few of them. It also has long-term prediction and so many other things. In fact the worst aspect of AAC is that it's very complicated to implement and if you turn on all these features (like long-term prediction, etc) you end up needing a lot of CPU to play it. But that is the right way to design a standard. Mobile phones three years from now are going to have Pentium II class CPUs standard, I would estimate, so we'll be able to use all the fancy features of AAC. And until then, there is AAC low-complexity.

If you want to learn a lot about AAC, check out the Audiocoding [audiocoding.com] website.

I'm kinda doubtful it ever catches on

[Sycraft-fu]

People have been crowing on about the surround music revolution for ever (quadrophonic, ambisonic, DVD-A, etc) and jack and shit has ever some from it. It's always remained firmly in the enthusast domain.

This is even less likely to change given how many peopel listen on portables these days. Those do only 2-channel, so the extra is nothing but a waste of space on the drive.

I mean I love DVD-Audio disks in surround, but then I'm the only one of my friends that has ever heard one, much less owns one.

No, really, why not OGG?

[FrYGuY101]

Especially since OGG Vorbis can support 255 independant channels...

Re:mp3PRO - your opinion

[TheKarateMaster]

I agree. I have an RCA Lyra RD2820 (iPod for poor people). All around, it isn't all that great, but it holds a lot of music, and it supports MP3PRO. 64bit sounds exactly like a 128 regular MP3. (but then again, I'm no audiophile.) Too bad MP3PRO never took off... It's divided the size of my music library by two. (and at 3000+ songs...)