New Lossless MP3 Format Explained 346
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."
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Re:I'll wait for the MP3-HHD-DVVDD-BVD format. (Score:5, Funny)
The chinese companies already have MP5 players ;)
Re:I'll wait for the MP3-HHD-DVVDD-BVD format. (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't an MP5 [wikipedia.org] player not be usable in many countries?
H&K (Score:5, Funny)
That MP5 format is really bad for your ears.
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Re:H&K (Score:5, Funny)
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Wouldn't an MP5 player not be usable in many countries?
Oh it's usable. Without a doubt. In fact, my problem is that once I started using it, I had to keep using it until everyone stopped complaining about me using it.
Re:I'll wait for the MP3-HHD-DVVDD-BVD format. (Score:4, Funny)
The device is an Mp10 player, it has built-in all the features of previous devices, that means, inside the mp10 there are an mp3, mp4, mp5, mp6, mp7, mp8 and mp9.
Someone from work one explained to me. Each feature, like a camera, mobile analogic TV, digital TV, fmRadio, etc. Each feature adds 1 to MpX.
why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Accidentally?
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think an even better comparison would be a car with a helicopter stapled to the trunk. That's not even right, since the car & helicopter are more analogous to the ipod and computer. This is more like everything you would put in your car has a 10:1 scale model of itself attached to it.
Its like every shirt in Arizona having a winter coat sewn to the back of it. Closets hold 1/10 as many clothes, but big closets are getting cheaper every day. The largest suitcases barely hold enough for a weekend trip. Everyone ends up dragging around winter coats like tails, even though they rarely ever need them.
My analogy is bad, but not as bad as this hybrid mp3 format. I suppose the format is OK for archival storage, but copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.
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Later you can enjoy the space and carrying options the truck gives you.
Or a bike on a RV.
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Re:why? (Score:5, Funny)
Yo dawg, I herd u like trucks
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
...copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.
Unless you sell flash memory.
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Re:why? (Score:4, Informative)
In case it isn't bleeding obvious (apparently it isn't): The key to good compression is prediction. If you can predict the signal to within a small margin of error, then you only need to encode a small error correction stream. In this case, the MP3 signal serves as the prediction and the remaining data is the correction stream. This concept requires that the prediction is stable, and since the prediction isn't an algorithm but based on actual data, that data has to be delivered with the correction stream. So this isn't so much MP3 with additional information as it's a lossless format which happens to use an MP3 stream as a component and is formatted such that MP3 players recognize just that stream.
Re:why? (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen some comparisons at another site [videohelp.com]. A 41 MB wave file gives a 20 MB FLAC, and 22 MB MP3HD. So if the MP3 was indeed a skeleton of the lossless portion, it isn't very efficient. It's the same size as a normal lossless format + a separate MP3, stuffed into the same file. Actually, I doubt the MP3 has any use at all in the lossless playback, but I am ready to be corrected if anyone can cite something and not just speculate.
Re:why? (Score:5, Informative)
The only use case can see is if you own a mp3 player with large storage that doesn't support playback of a proper lossless format.
With this you can keep and listen to the files on your mp3 player while also being able to decode them losslessly when you plug that player into a computer.
also given the filesize stats in the article it appears they aren't just bundling together a lossy and lossless format but actually making the lossless format build on the lossy format (either that or they have a lossless format that is considerablly better than flac).
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
And why put the MP3 part there at all? Why would you need it if you already have a lossless file?
If you transfer it to a player not capable of playing the lossless file it doesn't make sense to store it all over there, so converting it to a lossy only file is the way to do it, and well, you can do that while transferring the file ... ... but then using "MP3" and their technology doesn't make sense at all since there already exist plenty of lossless formats and one compressed one would be enough.
It would had been enough if they had made an app which hooked into Windows file copying to UMS devices and encoded any lossless formats into MP3 during the transfer.
All in all, yes, it's useless, and a stupid idea.
(And if you already have a lossless file while not convert to something like AAC or OGG instead?)
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And why put the MP3 part there at all? Why would you need it if you already have a lossless file?
Because the MP3 player can't play the lossless part.
Hey, I'm not the one who came up with the idea.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Couldn't you have both versions (lossy & lossless) in the same file, but strip the lossless upon copying to the mp3 player (ie by iTunes on an iPod)?
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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At the risk of getting a *whoosh* directed at me, isn't that exactly what they did with t
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selling music and getting rid of the "which is the right format for you?" question, which would end up in support costs.
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So its a new music format for idiots, basically. No advantages for non-idiots that know the difference between a MP3, AAC, OGG, and raw 44Khz files. And how to convert between them with Free software.
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If not, that explains why Free software advocates have trouble selling a free product...
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
which fraction of the population are non-idiots, according to your definition?
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which fraction of the population are non-idiots, according to your definition?
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
- George Carlin
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I imagine it contains the significantly smaller deltas between the output of the lossy codec and the the exact audio data?
The use case is presumably to not require 2 copies of the same data to maintain backwards compatibility.
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Ya! My 200G ipod can hold three songs now!
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Would have been smarter to have the MP3 player know to only download the lossy part of the file and metadata. I'm sure someone .flac and a lossy .ogg, and a program like gtkpod would know .ogg.
can figure out how to do this with the FLAC container, i.e., the FLAC file would have a
to only import the lossy
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Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
MP3 by itself is not a container format. It is a raw data stream designed for handling realtime audio processing. It sounds like this is more like a "hacked" MP3 with special invalid frames tacked on to the end with difference data, similar to the way ID3v2 tags and album art are embedded.
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Somebody at some point should really rally an army to go around and destroy every compressor and compressor plugin on this stupid planet.
I got nothing against compressing for effect, but the abuse it suffers in the mastering process is heinous. It is hilarious to hear the 'quiet' part of a song be just as loud as the 'loud' part. It's like somebody whispering to you at the top of their lungs.
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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?
Isn't the MP3 patent(s) about to run out in a year or two? In which case, would this be a significant enough modification to qualify for a new patent or an extension?
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it that the software copying the "MP3" over, can't strip out the ID3(v2?) tag containing the extra info, and just save out the "normal" MP3 to the portable device?
Surely that would be a reasonably small change, and solve half of the complaints against the format?
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But this new format makes two copies of everything, it only packages it in one file! It's the same thing as picking a mp3 and "attaching" a flac file at the end. The space occupied by the too is the same, but in only one file. If you had the two, at least you could save space in your portable players.
Btw, http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] is great: I keep my flac dirs in music/flac and I mount them using this in music/mp3. The mp3 dir show me all the tracks in mp3, so I can copy them directly to my player, but
The obvious problem (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:The obvious problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is storage space really that "precious" anymore?
Genuine question.
The decoder is first generation.
I'd like the option of spinning off an occasional low-fi copy.
But as I grow older, I've find myself less willing to accept the second-rate.
I find that my time has become precious. That I am no longer willing to invest it in nursing P2P downloads that are not worth saving.
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At the 'home station'? No. On the portable? Yes.
Cheap storage is not exactly portable yet, and portable storage isn't exactly cheap.
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The smallest iPod you can get is 80 gigs.
A full CD-length album, encoded to Flac, comes to around 350 megs.
So you can fit 228 full albums on a basic iPod. You'll just need something like RockBox to play the Flac (assuming it can).
I realize I'm probably behind the curve here, but I simply don't have that many albums in a lossless format.
Re:The obvious problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the smallest iPod you can get is 4G.
The smallest iPod classic, now considered a clunky dinosaur by Apple, is 120G.
A 4G iPod can hold 11 CD's of your 350mb Flac variety.
But that doesn't matter. Because the point was, a 120G iPod classic costs $250. I can walk into Best Buy, that overpriced mecca of electronic goods, and buy a terabyte USB drive for $150. And the classic is the iPod with the best 'storage vs cost' ratio.
That 4G shuffle costs $79 and it's nearest cousins, the 8G iPods cost $150.
At the same price: 8G vs 1000G (round about) Or in other words: 22 CDs vs just under 3,000 CDs
Portable storage is expensive. Home storage is cheap.
Wasting portable storage on something that would only be used at home, is pointless to the extreme.
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Is storage space really that "precious" anymore?
Perhaps not on a desktop (or even laptop) machine. But on a (physically) small portable device with permanently installed non-upgradeable storage, I think it probably still is.
And the right solution (for non-idiots) is to have larger high quality files (where available) on their home/'base' machine, and then encode smaller lower quality files for said portable device(s).
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This is useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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What the hell are you talking about here? It might fail to allocate a 256 MB block if the machine doesn't have enough memory, or if the program decoding the module is running in the kernel and using kmalloc, but for the most part, applications do
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Considering most people use a sync suite to manage their MP3 player couldn't this be part of the sync system?
If the container allows for easy dropping of the uncompressed bit you could have both in one file but at sync time tell itunes/zune etc to just strip the lossless version on the way out the door.
That way you dont' have to keep track of two files on your computer BUT you can also use the low quality version on iZune.
That sounds both convenient and useful.
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Considering most people use a sync suite to manage their MP3 player couldn't this be part of the sync system?
Well, couldn't re-encoding be part of the sync system, too? Store flacs, and re-encode to mp3s on sync? Amarok can do exactly that.
The only advantage is, re-encoding is time consuming, so it's nice if you only have to do it once, and then you store both versions on the desktop. And apparently, the lossless format is storing some sort of delta from the lossy version -- the combined file is bigger than a flac, but smaller than the space required for both a flac and an mp3.
But honestly, this doesn't seem to ma
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The 256MB is for the lossless part, not the mp3.
I have a 50 minute-long track. It's an mp3, but as a FLAC it'd either exceed or get damned near to 256MB. (FLAC gives you a file that's roughly 50-70% the size of the uncompressed audio. There are codecs that do better in ratio but they seem to all (?) require much more effort to decode.)
A Far Less Brain-Damaged Solution (for Linux) (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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...is MP3FS, a virtual file system that transcodes your FLAC files to MP3 on the fly (including metadata).
Thank you for the link. This seems like a sane solution to an annoying problem.
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Good call. I was about to suggest this myself.
I have used MP3FS and it worked perfectly.
It's *the* ideal solution for people like me who like to have high quality audio on their computer but are limited to MP3 on their MP3 player.
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I didn't read the article, but... (Score:2)
Is it actually FLAC, and do nightingales have it built in? [slashdot.org]
Loudness war (Score:2, Insightful)
Good idea, but with music being recorded with horrible loudness levels, its a waste. But I do like being able to not use something other than MP3, and burning back to a CD anytime I want.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org]
The stupidest format ever! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
All we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
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While I don't disagree you there. More codec support is always welcome. I think there are some advantages to running lossy codecs on portable players.
1) Capacity
2) Battery Life
Capacity isn't quite where we need to be for the average person to use lossless all the time. Assuming people have roughly 1700 songs [timesonline.co.uk] on it (A reference on Slashdot! woot!). If each mp3 song is 5megs you need an 8gig player to hold that. The lossless copy, is what? 30megs? You'd need about 50gigs to hold that same data, which is arou
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3) Revenue stream from a voice codec.
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Here you go: http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/ [cowonamerica.com]
Lower Bitrate = Longer Battery Life? (Score:2)
For example, does the audio processor on a portable mp3 player draw more power for higher bitrate files than lower bitrate files?
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I could see a use for this if they have a version that is lossless with a low quality version (say, 160 or 192kbps). The process of transferring the file to the portable mp3 player would extract the lower quality version and only store that data on the player (thus allowing the lossless data on the desktop, and the low quality space saving version on the player).
I'm guessing the format can't really do tha
Complete waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
Relevant hydrogenaudio thread: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=55b656dc8cdb3b97da794e936b2a9b1d&showtopic=70548 [hydrogenaudio.org]
In summary, it seems like a fairly useless and poorly thought out format. To be clear, this WILL NOT play losslessly in a standard mp3 player, you must use a special decoder to get the lossless bit. It will only play the lossy component in a normal mp3 player.
Lossless information stored in id3v2 tags? Bad hack that will break just about every tagging program out there. File sizes much larger than real lossless codecs and encoding/decoding speed is much slower than flac. Also you can't have tracks longer than about an hour due to id3v2 size limits. Additionally, a full size flac file and 256kbit mp3 often comes in at a SMALLER size than this one monolithic hacked up mp3.
Nothing to see here people, this is a waste of time. Something like lossy/lossless wavpack hybrid is a much better solution.
Sam
Learn with history or make the same mistakes. (Score:5, Informative)
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 .mp3pro or something like that, the mp3PRO format might have had some chance...
or a new mp3PRO file, since they both used the same file extension. Maybe if they had renamed
the extension to
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 .mp3hd or something similar.
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
I hope I am wrong, but this surely spells doom to me.
bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, the good thing about this would be that if someone actually buys a MP3 encoded this way they wouldn't be paying prime dollars for low quality lossy audio like they do now. But the bad news is that all mp3 appliances, as well as any current mp3 player that you have on your computer, will only play the low quality sound, the lossless track is rather hidden. And if you copy these mp3 files to your mp3 player, they end up wasting most of the space for something that will not be heard.
And, of course, this just muddies the waters. Some people may come to think that mp3 is decent quality (a few tracks might be), and then unknowingly buy low quality mp3 files without the extra hidden high quality track.
A far better "fix" to the problem would simply be to sell tracks in a high quality format, perhaps including a lower quality mp3 file with a lossless copy, although even if the mp3 were not included it should be able to be created as long as objectionable DRM were not part of the deal. There just seems to be no justification to packing both copies of the audio into the same file. Except, of course, as a marketing point. Lets take care of marketing right after we deal with the lawyers and politicians.
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People actually buy mp3s? Are you sure? Why?
what about (Score:3, Funny)
2 files is often a better solution (Score:2)
Why exactly do I want a hybrid file with twice the data on my MP3 player. I may not care about space on my computer hard drive as much but every song transfered to the MP3 player that's twice the size it needs to be pushes out another song that I could have taken with me.
Converting on the fly (if you value space more), or storing 2 versions and only uploading the right one to your player (if you value time more) seems like a much better solution.
Makes no sense (Score:2)
I'd be listening to FLAC on my iPod except that storage space is an issue. The entire point is that you're willing to trade-off lower sound quality for more space - on your portable player.
This just takes up more space. You're unable to play the higher-quality audio on your mp3 player (that's why you have the low-bitrate in the first place)... but you're still taking up space with it... I know! To get that space back, I'll just split the lossless audio from the 120kbps audio...
This is useless. Is there even
It's all in the name (Score:5, Funny)
I predict this will be a raging success on the scale of JPEG2000
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
My P-133 could do better than real time encoding of .wav -> .mp3
So why, when computers are now routinely 50 or 60 times faster than that, would I bother with two separate file formats crammed into one blob on the relatively tiny memory of my portable device?
Why, when disk space is now so cheap on my pc, can't I have a simple background process converting .flac into.mp3, to be stored separately for transfer to my portable device?
Why would I suddenly want to put up with 9/10th's of the storage capacity of my portable device being used for useless data?
In short, what the fuck were they thinking?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, what the fuck were they thinking?
"I wonder if this cow has any milk left in it?"
They're seeing if they can extract more $ for mp3 IP licenses.
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> My P-133 could do better than real time encoding of .wav -> .mp3
That's odd, since l3enc on my P133 ran at a very small fraction of real-time. Heck, it took 1/4 of the cpu just to do real-time playback.
Give me lossless! (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't RTFA (duh), but I wonder what codec they use for the lossless part? Not that I care, since I would transcode that to FLAC before I even played it.
Too Porky (Score:2, Interesting)
flac is of course lossless, and by definition reproduces a clone of source. it is also becomming ubiquitous. among those who care about quality or who swap bootlegs penetration is near 100%. it's a great format for these reasons. the problem is size. it's huge, on average nearly 2/3 that of a wav file. apes are slightly better, shrinking wavs to about half their size, but still quite large. really, if anything is going to unseat either flac or ape it's not going to be something even larger. it sounds as if
Another extension (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, yes, lets tweak this patent just a tad and see if we can extend it for another 20 years.
Evergreening (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like evergreening to me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening [wikipedia.org]
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To Thompson I would say you had your chance with rubbish MP3, so FLAC off!
Re:transpire? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't a transpire a male vampire who dresses like a female vampire?
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Most of the newer portable audio players have more than enough room, but if technologies like this become the norm for distributing audio, then the amount of songs that a player could hold would be more than halved...
Yes we have more "room" but the general trend has been to switch to flash-memory based players where more than 8 gigs of space is expensive. Add that with the rise of video, applications, photos and other large files on digital audio players and you will soon find out that there really isn't that much room.
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If they start supporting mp3hd, you mean.
Re:The only loss... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you can define "fair compensation", we can start to worry about whether or not artists are getting it.
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So when driving to work your fuel economy sucks because you have second engine that probably doubles the weight of the car that you don't use.
And when you are at the race track you lose all your races because you have a second engine you aren't using adding weight to slow you down.
Re:I'm the only one that thinks this is a good ide (Score:5, Insightful)
My reply is why bother supporting a proprietary format to incorporate lossless audio when there's already a well-developed open standard already, namely FLAC? By your argument, the expansion of disk space makes lossless storage more attractive. I agree with that, but what I don't want is for everyone to hop on board another standard from Thomson and friends which can't legally be supported in free and open software.
Forward-thinking companies like COWON support open formats like FLAC and Matroska. Other players should as well. We've all suffered long enough with proprietary formats that bring nothing extra to the table other than the marketing power of large corporate backers.
You're alone. (Score:2)
If your assumption that storage space will increase beyond need is true, then why bother with lossy files at all, let alone combination ones which are larger than lossless?
One can expect that media players, as their storage expands beyond that needed for lossy compressed storage, will support lossless and PCM (".wav") formats. The market leader already does.
Given ample storage, just use PCM (.wav) files, or lossless compression
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Unfortunately, the 800HP fire breathing engine is so big that it took up all the space of your SUV trunk and the back seats (second and third row).
It made your wife mad, so you ended up buying here the minivan she wanted to replace your other car, a small sedan, so at least she can truck the kids around and go grocery shopping.
Then the extra weight on your monster reduce your mileage from 25MPG to 5MPG when you use the 50-states street legal engine on your daily commute.
Your gas bills are getting so huge th
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This is like a car with two motors. One motor is street legal and can be driven in all fifty states. The second is a fully modified fire-breathing 800HP monster that can only be used in closed-course racing.
This is an apt comparison - the extra weight of the street legal motor will ensure that you lose every race you compete in.