'Son of MP3' to launch today
Posted: 14/06/2001 at 15:24 GMT
The brains behind the controversial MP3 digital audio
format will unveil a higher quality, more compact version later today.
Called MP3 Pro, the format emerged earlier this year and was to
have
made its first public appearance late March or early April.
MP3
Pro's
creators, France's Thomson Multimedia and Germany's Fraunhofer Institute,
claim
the new format requires half the disk space needed to encode the previous
generation of MP3 files. Alternatively, it will double the sound quality at
the
same file size - essentially a 128Kbps MP3 Pro file will take up as much
storage
space as a 64Kbps MP3 track.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the new
format
isn't entirely backward compatible. An MP3 Pro player will have no trouble
pumping out older MP3 files. Existing MP3 players will reproduce MP3 Pro
files
poorly, since the new version splits audio data into two streams,
unlike
MP3's single stream. MP3 players will play one of MP3 Pro's two streams,
resulting in a significant loss of fidelity.
Like MP3, the new
technology will be provided free to writers of non-commercial audio
decoders,
but producers of encoding software and commercial decoders will have to
license
the codec. MP3 Pro royalties are around 50 per cent higher than their MP3
equivalents.
As yet, MP3 Pro has had no official backing from any
of the
major digital music companies. Only Thomson has said it will use the
technology
in digital music hardware it is planning to release later this year. ®