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MP3 is all around us

Posted on 22 Mar 2004 at 12:47

The creators of the MP3 format - the Fraunhofer Institute - are planning to extend the encoding system to simulate surround sound.

Dubbed MP3 Surround, extra data is added to the sound files to encode directional information, enabling the simulation of surround sound without having to record audio data on separate channels.

The Institutes states that the new system will be compatible with existing MP3 software and music players, but obviously new players will be needed to take advantage of the new sound support.

'Enjoying personal multi-channel audio has been on the wish list of the MP3 user community for quite some time,' said Jürgen Herre, Chief Executive Scientist at Fraunhofer IIS, Erlangen. 'This is exactly what MP3 Surround has to offer - and it does so at astoundingly low bit rates.'

Already demonstrated at CeBit 2004, products using the new technology are not expected to be available before July.

It was the Fraunhofer Institute that created the MP3 codec (coder/decoder) back in 1987. Standing for MPEG-1 Layer 3, it uses an algorithm to compress digital sound files by a factor of 12 while still maintaining near-CD quality at 128Kbits/sec (Layer 1 compresses a file to about one quarter the size at 384Kbits/sec, but Layer 3 offers the best sound quality at a given bit-rate).

It is not the first time that the Institute has extended the capabilities of MP3 - a few years ago they initiated mp3PRO, which it claimed to be able to compress audio more than twice as efficiently as the standard mp3 codec, using two channels.

MP3 files, of course, are a way of encoding sound files that are small enough to conveniently access over networks, such as the Internet, while retaining an acceptable level of sound quality.