What happened to the new generation of MP3 files?

Factual Questions
1

Around a year or so ago, perhaps a little longer it was front page news for Yahoo! that a new generation of MP3 had been developed… It was called Super MP3, MP3 Pro or something like that… it was supposed to offer the same quality for half the file size and would be incompatible with any current generation MP3 players…
Since then I’ve not heard a thing… anyone know anything about it?

Thanks…

2

MP3Pro is rather underwhelming. It only has a quality advantage at very low bitrates (under 96kbps or so), and requires a compatible player to sound better than MP3 at all. Basically, it works by performing aggressive lowpass filtering, then embedding data on how to reconstruct high frequency audio. For example, a 64kbps MP3Pro file contains a 56kbps MP3 stream with all of the high-frequency sound cut out to improve compressibility, and an 8kbps stream of data telling the player how to reconstruct that high frequency data. The idea is that it will, overall sound better than a 64kbps MP3. It does, but it CERTAINLY doesn’t live up to the “sounds twice as good!” claim. IMHO, 64kbps MP3Pro sounds something like 80kbps MP3.

MP3 Pro never really took off because there are much better audio compression formats available. Apple and many others have adopted AAC, the MPEG-2 audio standard, which allows for surround sound. OggVorbis, a completely free audio compression format, is generally considered to provide the best audio quality available at this time, though its use is not yet widespread.

3

You can’t play them on portable players. That seems like a rather crippling blow.

4

If I understood correctly, you CAN play them on anything that can play MP3s, including portable players. It’s just that without direct support of mp3pro they will sound like standard 64 kbs mp3s.

5

No, without supporting the MP3Pro data, a 64kbps MP3Pro file would sound like a 56kbps MP3 without any high frequency audio data. In other words, a good bit worse than a normal MP3.

6

I hope OGG takes off. It’s a great format, works as well if not better then most mp3 encoders, and is open.

The only problem,. I don’t see companies like Sony or WB getting excited over OGG as it IS open.

7

I switched over to OGG for 3 reasons. It’s completely free and open-source, it has noticably better audio quality at lower bitrates than MP3, and supports seamless playback which is a major bonus for live CDs.