The next mp3

[Druen]

Today the mp3 format is some years old and I wanted to ask people here on the board if they know of any projects that could be "the next" mp3. A new format with better sound and bette compression must be posssible.

[willy_annand]

AC3, as it is now the DVD sound standard.

[txpharoah]

AC3, as it is now the DVD sound standard.

Yeah, AC3.

[flaninacupboard]

Microsoft are of course pushing their .wmv format, and thanks in part to windows XP's version of media player, they're getting there. .wmv is the lazy persons codec of the future.

personally i'd like to see better and better lossless compression for music. Flak audio and monkey audio are going the right way, with lossless compression at about 5:1.

the trend for lower and lower bitrates will come to an end eventually, after all, music is quite complex, and you couldn't compress a whole song into 01110110.

[phatslug]

I don't play around with AC3 that much, is it really good?
Does it have better compression/quality than MP3, or OGG?

[supersam]

for myself i like the new format ....ogg. it has a far better compression ratio and it sounds awesome. plus u can download music alot quicker due to its smaller file size

[sterno]

As I recall, stereo Ogg Vorbis encoding is usually smaller than AC3 at the same quality (to the average ear), but the multichannel Vorbis isn't as good as a Dolby Digital AC3 for some technical reasons that I don't entirely understand. During development somebody put a lot of work in to tuning the vorbis encoder's 2-channel psy model, but nobody's done the same for multichannel yet.

Vorbis is technologically superior to MP3 in most cases, but I'm not sure if that will be enough to make it take off. I think that at least one of the companies that makes hardware MP3 players is planning to support Ogg Vorbis, but I don't think any of the big-name products have taken that step yet. If Vorbis really gets big, companies will support it. If a company gets behind it and aggressively markets their product as supporting Vorbis audio, that would help it take off. But one or the other has to happen first.

[David K]

Another contender is AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). This is the format that Apple is using for its new Music download store instead of MP3. AAC is a development from the ISO group that developed mp2 and mp3. AAC can be put in a mpeg 2 or mpeg 4 "wrapper." It seems that most of the development of it has been in the mpeg 4 context (Apple includes it intheir Mpeg 4 format in Quicktime.) Nero has a plug-in for encoding to AAC.

(I haven't seen anyone pushing AC3 as a format for music only.)

[secretagent]

PLUS V

With traditional MP3, a typical Near CD Quality audio file has been encoded with a data rate of 128 kbits/s. While this is ok for people with big hard disks and fast Internet connections, this data speed has clearly been a bottleneck for people using modems or storing their music into 32 or 64 MB portable player FLASH cards. PlusV is a brand new audio compression enhancement technology that allows audio files to be compressed in as little as 64 or even 48 kbits/s.

PlusV is not a compression scheme of its own, it is an extension that can be applied to existing audio formats. When combined with the MP3 technology, MP3+V files are fully compatible with existing MP3 files and decoders. To get full audio quality out of PlusV files, you just need a PlusV capable decoder, like a PlusV capable WinAmp plugin.

[kazzer]

Sony's ATRAC is out a long time but I think its becoming more popular as I see ATRAC discman's are available. I dont know how ATRAC compression compares to MP3 though....

...Anyone?