Support for mp3HD planned?

[Thymaster]

Hi,

I just found this:
http://www.all4mp3.com/Software3.aspx
It a de-/encoder for the IMO brand-new mp3HD format!

What's so great about it?
It compresses lossless(!) at the same compression level of FLAC but it produces mp3-compatible files, allowing to play such lossless format on most mp3 players!

Would be great if you could very soon add support for this new format!

TIA
ThyMaster

[Spoon]

I have a feeling this format will do even worse than mp3pro (who would want to upload a huge .mp3 file to their portable went the only quality they get is mp3, not lossless)...

[Thymaster]

OK, fair enough (I also figured that ordinary mp3 players will only play the lossy part of it) but nonetheless it would be great for ripping my CDs w/o fiddling around with two files for each song - one in FLAC and one in MP3....

Which brings me back m (still unanswered) question:
Will you support it?

TIA
ThyMaster

[wiak]

makes sense
and it should be realy easy to make a encoder for dbpoweramp, its just like the Nero AAC plugin

Thomson mp3HD software Toolkit includes:
mp3HD command line encoder
mp3HD command line decoder
Winamp plug-in

Example: mp3hdEncoder.exe -br 128000 -if test.wav -of test.mp3

http://www.all4mp3.com/Software3.aspx

usefulness is
you can play your mp3HDs on a PC in lossless quality, you can play them on a portal music player in standard mp3 quality and play them in lossless with a mp3HD Compatible Portal Player

its a win win for all, most players will mp3HD as standard mp3s, but if you got a mp3HD compatible player you get lossless
its NOT like mp3PRO where it makes better sound based lossy compression

[iangrant]

It's great for on your PC for, as has been mentioned, avoiding keeping two copies in, e.g. FLAC and MP3.

It's crap if you only have a flash portable with, say, 4GB of memory, as where previously you used MP3 for 3-4MB file, now MP3HD gives you a ~25MB file, with no better quality.

If, however, the MP3 portion is easily extractable, then I can see a future whereby when you sync it to your portable, just the lossy MP3 is uploaded.
It's a bit like WavPack Hybrid, isn't it?

[Porcus]

w/o fiddling around with two files for each song - one in FLAC and one in MP3....

Suggestion: Keep in FLAC, and whenever you need MP3, convert rather than copy.

[shawn2333]

Hmm, well it seems since most folks have very large music libraries, and at these file sizes it puts an average album at 500mb. So formats / bitrates like these most likely will not become useful, much less popular until much much larger hard drives are on the market and affordable. I'm talking 100TB hard drives, because something like that is what would be needed to make people with thousands and thousands of songs even consider using mp3HD. At the rate we are going drives like that will be around sometime in the next 10 years, but at that time, itunes, or hopefully a predecessor that doesn't use syncing, will most likely encode the mp3s at higher bitrates automatically, and your average user will not even realize what is going on as he happily loads his giant collection onto his new iphone 12 with it's 100TB of storage. But we live right now, and I know I'm not going to put 500mb sized albums on my portable player, so I'll continue using mp3 VBR at V1 setting, because that sounds more than good enough for me, the reality is only a select few quality freaks will even have any use for this new format, however I am not disregarding it completely, because as I said, in the near future we will have much larger storage devices on our pcs, phones, portable players, and even in the next two years there will be SD cards with 2TB those will be the new SD XC, extended capacity, but as we keep moving towards huge storage, this format will have an applicable use, but most folks won't even know there has even been a change, especially if it keeps the extension .mp3, if you don't believe me try asking your average 35-40 year old or even a lot of college aged folks what the bit rate of that song they are listening to on their ipod is, and most of time they will respond.."uh what's a bit rate?"

PS I bought a new phone that can play music and it supports the mp3HD format, and yes it does sound noticeably better, but I still will not use it for the majority of my albums, I have it set for 2 of my favorites, and a couple of favorite songs, but that is far as I will go with it for now, also it takes a few seconds longer for my phone to actually load the mp3HD files, but they do playback at higher quality.

[Porcus]

Hmm, well it seems since most folks have very large music libraries, and at these file sizes it puts an average album at 500mb. So formats / bitrates like these most likely will not become useful, much less popular until much much larger hard drives are on the market and affordable. I'm talking 100TB hard drives, because something like that is what would be needed to make people with thousands and thousands of songs even consider using mp3HD.

"thousands and thousands" ... a 2TB drive suffices for about 40 000 songs. Most folks do not have that much.

To get a grasp of your "100TB" figure: Some years ago, I saw an estimate -- from a highly non-autoritative source yes -- of five million songs available digitally. That would then take 250 TB.