MP3Pro and beyond
- Posted:
- 14:14 26 Jul 2001
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.
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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.
