Improved Digital Audio Schemes Debut

First, the sobering reality: Among the world's billions of music lovers, probably a million or fewer are true audiophiles, for whom sound quality is a primary concern. The uncritical majority will embrace any audio technology that offers economy and convenience. Case in point: the popularity of the MP3 digital format, widely derided by audiophiles for its compressed dynamics and lack of detail, but adopted readily by the general public because of its ease of use.

Although the format came into being less than four years ago, portable MP3 players in use now number in excess of 12 million, according to Henri Linde, vice president for new business in Thomson Multimedia's patent and licensing division. He estimates that there are more than 250 million personal computers playing MP3 files. "Practically every song in the world has been encoded as an MP3 file," he says. "These numbers underscore the tremendous appeal MP3 has within the global consumer marketplace."

The good news is that engineers at Thomson and other companies haven't been content with the limitations of MP3, and have been working diligently to improve the format's performance. The culmination of these efforts is a turbo-charged version called MP3Pro, which recently debuted as a free download on several websites, including two (1, 2,) constructed by Thomson Multimedia. The improved codec is said to offer better sound quality, especially in the high frequencies, while retaining "forward and backward compatibility" with the original MP3 format.

Developed by a Swedish/German company, Coding Technologies, a division of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, under contract to Paris-based Thomson Multimedia SA, MP3Pro also allows for higher compression with fewer compromises, according to announcements made in mid-June. The format's improved high-frequency resolution is attributed to a technique called Spectral Band Replication (SBR), which supposedly "regenerates" harmonics and high-frequency information that would otherwise be lost. "SBR is a very efficient way to code high frequencies," said Coding Technologies president and chief executive officer Martin Dietz. MP3Pro offers twice the playback time and better sound than does standard MP3; enhanced with SBR's digital signal processing, an MP3Pro recording at a compression bit rate of 64kbps is said to be better than a stereo MP3 at 100kbps.

Normal audio CDs can hold approximately 15 songs; using MP3, the capacity of a CD-R can be as high as 150 songs. With MP3Pro, a CD-R can contain more than 300 songs of relatively high quality, according to Thomson Multimedia. MP3Pro is compatible with all recent Windows operating systems, provided that installed software players support sampling rates of 16, 22.5, 24, 32, 44.1 and 48kHz. MP3Pro for Mac OS 9 and Linux will appear later this year.

In the design of the format, Thomson did not provide for copyright protection (or "digital rights management," in the patois of the music industry), but a company spokesman said that feature could be added later. "Consumers haven't been clamoring for DRM technology," he explained.

As MP3Pro is making its debut, so is something called Ogg Vorbis. Neither a video game, nor a comic strip, nor a science fiction hero, Ogg Vorbis is a compressed audio file format developed by independent researchers with the intention of competing against MP3. In various iterations, Ogg Vorbis has been floating around the Internet for more than a year as it was tested and refined. Said to provide better audio quality than MP3, it's now ready for its official public debut, and will appear the weekend of June 17 as release 1.0. The developers hope to win marketplace acceptance for the software, which has reportedly already been adopted by AOL Time Warner.

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