It has been hugely successful, but what now for the MP3 audio
compression format?
Aside from the Internet itself, there can be few computer
technologies that have been embraced so quickly by general users or
had such a profound influence in their respective spheres as that
of the MP3 audio compression format.
And yet none of this mini-revolution was planned. MP3 (short for
MPeg-1 Layer 3) grew out of research work at the German Fraunhofer
Institute for Integrated Circuits. Much of this was incorporated in
the standard adopted by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPeg) of
the International Standards Organisation (ISO) for its work on
sound coding.
MP3 would have remained just another dusty ISO standard had it not
been for the rise of the Internet. MP3's typical compression ratio
of 10 to one meant that digital sound files - especially those
derived from music CDs - could be sent over the Net in a reasonable
time. This ultimately led to the creation of the Napster
file-sharing system, which at its height had tens of millions of
users.
The music recording industry's battle with Napster is another
story, but the relentlessness with which it pursues anything that
facilitates the swapping of MP3 files indicates the extent to which
this technology has been able to shake a powerful industry to its
foundations.
Thomson
Multimedia owns several important patents affecting MP3.
There is a history and information about how MP3 achieves its
apparently impossible balancing act of compressing music enormously
without an equivalent loss of perceived
quality.
Other sites provide more
historical
and
technical
details.
Although MP3 has only risen to prominence in recent years, it is
hardly new. The MPeg audio group began work in 1988. In the face of
increasing competition from later compression techniques, Thomson
has recently come out with MP3Pro, which it claims offers the same
quality in half the file-size.
MP3Pro
uses technology from
Coding Technologies. There were more than
500,000 downloads of MP3Pro in the days after it was
unveiled. The same press release claims that there are 12 million
portable MP3 players and 250 million personal computers playing MP3
files.
Although an MP3Pro encoder and decoder can be
downloaded for free, and the Fraunhofer Institute
provides
other
programs, in general, various
royalties
must be paid to use Thomson's encoders and decoders.
There is an excellent open source MP3 encoder called
Lame, but a useful
FAQ
on patent issues makes clear that things are rather a mess in this
area. Those behind the Xiphophorus company
FAQ
are more emphatic, and claim that everyone needs to pay
royalties.
As an alternative, they offer
Ogg Vorbis "a
fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free
general-purpose compressed audio format." The project is still in
its early stages, but looks promising. Its main problem is that it
is a completely new format, and would require hundreds of millions
of MP3 users to swap.
The Ogg Vorbis group is not alone in hoping for this unlikely
eventuality. Microsoft came late to the audio compression world,
and its moves there have been very aggressive - and increasingly
successful. As next week's column will discuss, the online music
battle is not about who has the best
technology for
this, but who has the most power.