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Are all mp3 converters the same?


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Encoding varies in quality because stanndards for sampleing were left open to designers to implement their own codes.

 

decoders on the other hand are standard so the files can be played back on most any equipment or decoded by all audio programs.

 

As per Wiki

 

Encoding audioThe MPEG-1 standard does not include a precise specification for an MP3 encoder, but does provide example psychoacoustic models, rate loop, and the like in the non-normative part of the original standard.[40] At present, these suggested implementations are quite dated. Implementers of the standard were supposed to devise their own algorithms suitable for removing parts of the information from the audio input. As a result, there are many different MP3 encoders available, each producing files of differing quality. Comparisons are widely available, so it is easy for a prospective user of an encoder to research the best choice. It must be kept in mind that an encoder that is proficient at encoding at higher bit rates (such as LAME) is not necessarily as good at lower bit rates.

 

During encoding, 576 time-domain samples are taken and are transformed to 576 frequency-domain samples. If there is a transient, 192 samples are taken instead of 576. This is done to limit the temporal spread of quantization noise accompanying the transient. (See psychoacoustics.)

 

[edit] Decoding audioDecoding, on the other hand, is carefully defined in the standard. Most decoders are "bitstream compliant", which means that the decompressed output

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There are a very large number of wrappers (software programs that provide a user interface for a command line codec) for several still active codecs. Most of the wrappers I'm aware of use either the Fraunhofer/Thomson (Thomson now apparently calls its consumer electronics face Technicolor, a nameplate they bought a while back) or the open source LAME encoder.

 

Since both the Fraunhofer and LAME codecs have a very large number of command line parameters ( http://lame.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lame/lame/USAGE ) the wrappers often have extremely simplified UIs with a limited number of options, as well as preset combinations of options and such. Because there could be such a wide variety of settings covered by defaults and presets, users weren't exposed to all the internal settings and so, when comparing different wrappers, would think that some were faster than others, some produced better sound at a given bitrate, etc.

 

But, in reality since there are only a handful of codecs, most of the wrappers in recent years have used either a Fraunhofer codec or LAME, and the perceived differences between wrappers (many of which include a player interface of some kind as well) actually mostly break down to differences between configurations of the various Fraunhofer codecs (some of the older codecs may still be in use under Fraunhofer license) and the LAME codec.

 

 

The only Mp3 codecs of which I'm aware are Fraunhofer/Thomson/Technicolor's discontinued L3enc, MP3enc, and Fastenc codecs (none of which are actively marketed) which have been succeeded by their (current) mp3HD codec, which features surround capabailities, the discontinued Xing Technologies encoder and decoder (Xing was bought by RealNetworks in '99), LAME, and the old BladeEnc, which is now apparently distributed under LGPL license.

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The leading company in regards to compression technology is SaeHan Information Systems. SaeHan Information Systems is credited with the development of the world's first MP3 player.

 

Software the webmasters integrate in webservices, this coding including lightweight real-time MP3 encoder on the fly, and batch processing for large catalogues, is a company in Taiwan.

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The leading company in regards to compression technology is SaeHan Information Systems. SaeHan Information Systems is credited with the development of the world's first MP3 player.


Software the webmasters integrate in webservices, this coding including lightweight real-time MP3 encoder on the fly, and batch processing for large catalogues, is a company in Taiwan.

Ah yes, the first hardware player, SaeHan's MPMan, released in '98. (The much better known Rio came out not that long after.) Someplace around here I have a very early hardware player -- it had 32 MB of RAM (enough for a long EP at then typical 128 kbps) and used a parallel port for connection to the computer!

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I can only speak from experience with various programs over the years, but no they are not the same. I don't know much about which programs use which algorithms, so I won't speak to that. I can only say in a practical sense some are ok and some are not so good.

 

The ones I liked when I was doing a lot of conversion to and from mp3...

 

-Cool Edit Pro

-MusicMatch Jukebox

-Winamp

 

There's a lot out there now and some are just peachy. It comes down to whether or not it sounds right to you. If you like the results... you've go it. ;)

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I can only speak from experience with various programs over the years, but no they are not the same. I don't know much about which programs use which algorithms, so I won't speak to that. I can only say in a practical sense some are ok and some are not so good.


The ones I liked when I was doing a lot of conversion to and from mp3...


-Cool Edit Pro

-MusicMatch Jukebox

-Winamp


There's a lot out there now and some are just peachy. It comes down to whether or not it sounds right to you. If you like the results... you've go it.
;)

... A perfect example of what I'm talking about with regard to the same codec appearing to have different properties when used within different wrappers, since, AFAIK, MMJB, WinAmp (and maybe Cool Edit Pro, but I dropped out of Cool Edit back on CE96) use some form of Fraunhofer codec. (Of course, that's not to suggest that all the versions of the Fraunhofer codec listed above necessarily sounded the same, even with the same parameter values.)

 

The reason I think that Cool Edit is a safe guess is because, in the past, very few (OK, none, in my direct experience) commercial programs will risk including a non-Fraunhofer codec in a commercial product because of Fraunhofer's aggressive assertions of intellectual property. [EDIT: looks like Cool Edit 2000 shipped with a (60 second limit) demo of the Fraunhofer codec.*]

 

That's why Microsoft went to the expensive lengths of developing their own compressed audio format rather than either defying Fraunhofer or paying the $3 per package that they were at one point demanding to license their codec. [CORRECTION: should have been 3% of related revenue.]

 

It's also why so many commercial program will include a time-out demo of the Fraunhofer codec but then leave it to the user to either pay for the license or point the program to a different codec installed on the system.

 

That's why Sonar, for instance, never included an mp3 encoder (until the latest version IIUC). I've always taken advantage of that to create my own in-Sonar codec 'presets' (basically templates that set up my desired command line switches) for the LAME encoder.

 

 

* "Cool Edit 2000 is Syntrillium's newer version of Cool Edit 96, an award winning audio editing software. The program fills a niche for those who are interesting in beginning or continuing with audio recording and creation but don't need the professional features (and price) of Cool Edit Pro.

Since audio editing is the main utility, mp3 features are kind of an aside. To rip tracks from a CD, simply play the track with the CD player controls and then hit record on the lower left panel and hit stop on both controls when finished. Cool Edit will produce a waveform view of the track upon completion. To convert to MP3, choose 'Save As' and choose MPEG Layer 3 under the 'save as type' option.

You will be able to encode 60 seconds of the track in the trial version using one of Fraunhofer's codecs in either CBR or VBR modes. Decoding MP3s is just as easy using the same kind of save options to choose the type of WAV file you want to export to." -- http://www.mp3-converter.com/cool_edit_2000.htm

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Yeah, I did the free (AIRI) CoolEdit, was impressed, and bought CoolEdit 96. Before those, I'd been using a wave editor that came with my old Soundblaster something-or-other 32 (need coffee to remember) and that really sucked. It took forever to edit anything. CoolEdit, even the free one, was a far, far better editor. It still took a while for changes to be made, but it was nothing like the Creative editor, where you'd have to edit from the end of the while backwards to the beginning because of the wildly inefficient file editing/saving. CoolEdit showed the way forward. But when Cakewalk Pro Audio came out in '97, which I'd been waiting for, I immediately switched and was impressed because it was considerably better, still. Not too long after I got Sound Forge for stereo file editing, 'mastering,' and analysis.

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read that:





Fraunhofer isn't holding a patent on MPEG compression technologies, only on their own technology.


Companies make their own algoritm, because otherwise they have to pay licence fees.

 

 

You cannot escape license fees by making your own algorithm. If you support the MP3 audio standard, you owe a license to Fraunhofer (they make codecs you can license) and to Sisvel (which doesn't make jack diddly, but they collect a royalty).

 

The chart you link to shows you the different implementations of MP3 you can buy from Fraunhofer. But even if you don't buy one, you pay a royalty. You'd have to see the license agreement for confirmation of that.

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any company can make their own compression/decompression codecs such as as LAME, VOBIS, Microsoft and so on does, which allows it to avoid licensing issues associated with patents by avoiding usage of the MP3 format entirely,

 

and mp3 is anyway not the delivery format anymore in digital distribution,

 

and here the Fraunhofer mp3 patent expired in 1997, so say bai bai to Fraunhofer, in the US the mp3 patent when using Fraunhofer will last until 2017

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any company can make their own compression/decompression codecs such as as LAME, VOBIS, Microsoft and so on does, which allows it to avoid licensing issues associated with patents by avoiding usage of the MP3 format entirely,


and mp3 is anyway not the delivery format anymore in digital distribution,


and here the Fraunhofer mp3 patent expired in 1997, so say bai bai to Fraunhofer, in the US the mp3 patent when using Fraunhofer will last until 2017

As with so many intellectual property issues, the situation is complex to the point of murkiness.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues:

Many organizations have claimed ownership of
related to MP3 decoding or encoding. These claims have led to a number of legal threats and actions from a variety of sources, resulting in uncertainty about which patents must be licensed in order to create MP3 products without committing patent infringement in countries that allow software patents.

 

 

 

The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S.
The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on December 6, 1991 as ISO CD 11172.
In the United States, patents cannot claim inventions that were already publicly disclosed more than a year prior to the filing date, but for patents filed prior to June 8, 1995,
made it possible to extend the effective lifetime of a patent through application extensions. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable; if only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding may be patent free in the US by September 2015 when
expires which had a PCT filing in Oct 1992.

 

 

 

(formerly called Thomson Consumer Electronics) claims to control MP3 licensing of the Layer 3 patents in many countries, including the
,
,
and EU countries.
Technicolor has been actively enforcing these patents.

 

 

 

MP3 license revenues generated about
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That whole legal crap all happen in the US.



:lol:

Not according to France-based Technicolor SA (formerly Thomson SA):

 

http://mp3licensing.com/help/index.html#4

 

1) Do you license mp3 and mp3surround software to end users?

 

No.
We license mp3 software and patents to developers and manufacturers of software applications and hardware devices.

2) Where can I read more about mp3 and mp3surround?

 

Check out our section
about mp3 and mp3surround
.

 

3) Where do I get mp3 and mp3surround software?

 

Many software companies have a license for mp3 software applications from us (See list of
Licensed Companies
). Please contact them directly for their mp3/mp3PRO products or visit their web site.

4) Do I need a license to stream mp3 or mp3surround encoded content over the Internet?

 

Yes.
A license is needed for commercial (i.e., revenue-generating) use of mp3/mp3PRO in broadcast systems (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or other distribution channels), streaming applications (via Internet, intranets and/or other networks), other content distribution systems (pay-audio or audio-on-demand applications and the like) or for use of mp3/mp3PRO on physical media (compact discs, digital versatile discs, semiconductor chips, hard drives, memory cards and the like).

However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.

Links:
Royalty Rates - Electronic Music Distribution

5) Do I need a license to distribute mp3 or mp3surround encoded content?

 

Yes.
A license is needed for commercial (i.e., revenue-generating) use of mp3/mp3PRO in broadcast systems (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or other distribution channels), streaming applications (via Internet, intranets and/or other networks), other content distribution systems (pay-audio or audio-on-demand applications and the like) or for use of mp3/mp3PRO on physical media (compact discs, digital versatile discs, semiconductor chips, hard drives, memory cards and the like).

However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.

Links:
Royalty Rates - Electronic Music Distribution

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My apologies if I already explained this to your previous user name, but Sisvel is collecting royalties on MP3 all over Europe.


 

And, while Sisvel has offices all over the world, they are headquartered smack in the middle of Europe, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

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I think a central takeaway here is that (pardon the cliche) the "patent quagmire" has become a Sargasso Sea of impenetrable murk that is holding technological progress in a Horse Latitude of innovation-entropy.

 

 

Apologies to Albert for that sentence above -- I know that while he speaks something like 9 languages that English is not his first.

 

For my own amusement -- and to try to get some idea of how much of my intended message (in the sentence above) might get through -- I ran it through Google Translate, first to German, then back to English:

 

I think a key takeaway here is that (pardon the cliche), the "patent quagmire" has become an impenetrable darkness of the Sargasso Sea, the holding company of technological progress in a Horse Latitude innovation entropy.

 

;)

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And, while Sisvel has offices all over the world, they are headquartered smack in the middle of Europe, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

 

 

Sisvel is particularly notorious when it comes to enforcing its European patents. The way they operate is to direct customs officials in Europe to seize shipments of allegedly infringing software.

 

See: http://www.sisvel.com/english/news/sisvelnews/sisvelsparticipation

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