MP3 Surround is an extension of MP3 for multi-channel audio support including 5.1 surround sound. It was developed by Fraunhofer IIS in collaboration with Thomson and Agere Systems, and released in December 2004. [1] [2] [3]
MP3 is a coding format for digital audio. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended—defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels—as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard. A third version, known as MPEG 2.5—extended to better support lower bit rates—is commonly implemented, but is not a recognized standard.
Surround sound is a technique for enriching the fidelity and depth of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener. Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to surround sound, theater sound systems commonly had three "screen channels" of sound, from loudspeakers located in front of the audience at the left, center, and right. Surround sound adds one or more channels from loudspeakers behind the listener, able to create the sensation of sound coming from any horizontal direction 360° around the listener. Surround sound formats vary in reproduction and recording methods along with the number and positioning of additional channels. The most common surround sound specification, the ITU's 5.1 standard, calls for 6 speakers: Center (C) in front of the listener, Left (L) and Right (R) at angles of 60° on either side of the center, and Left Surround (LS) and Right Surround (RS) at angles of 100–120°, plus a subwoofer whose position is not critical.
The Fraunhofer Society is a German research organization with 72 institutes spread throughout Germany, each focusing on different fields of applied science. With some 26,600 employees, mainly scientists and engineers and with an annual research budget of about €2.6 billion it is the biggest organization for applied research and development services in Europe.
MP3 Surround is backward compatible with standard MP3. [1] [4] The data overhead is 16 kbit/s, which allows for file sizes similar to standard stereo MP3 files. The file size is approximately 10% larger than that of a typical MP3 file. The current evaluation encoder is licensed for personal and non-commercial uses. An MP3 Surround file can be created from 5 or 6 channels of WAV audio.
Waveform Audio File Format is an audio file format standard, developed by Microsoft and IBM, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus is also close to the 8SVX and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format.
Several companies, such as DivX, Inc. and Magix, have announced support for the new codec. [5] [6] DivX, Inc. released their first player with MP3 Surround support on September 6, 2006.
DivX, Inc., is a privately held video technology company based in San Diego, California. DivX, LLC is best known as a producer of three codecs: an MPEG-4 Part 2-based codec, the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC DivX Plus codec and the High Efficiency Video Coding DivX HEVC Ultra HD codec. The company's software has been downloaded over 1 billion times since January 2003. DivX, LLC's offerings have expanded beyond the codec to include software for viewing and authoring DivX-encoded video. DivX, LLC also licenses its technologies to manufacturers of consumer electronics devices and components used in these devices, of which over 1 billion DivX-enabled devices have shipped worldwide. DivX certifies that these licensed products are able to properly play DivX-encoded video.
Magix, a German developer of consumer software solutions, develops software solutions for video editing, audio editing, DAW and photo slideshow. The company was founded in 1993. The software caters to professionals & DIY users. The company is based in Berlin. Additional locations are: Madison, Wisconsin (USA), Dresden and Lübbecke, as well as Huizen in the Netherlands
In January 2006, Thomson and Fraunhofer IIS also released two new companion technologies: Ensonido, which allows playback of MP3 Surround 5.1 channel sound through stereo headphones, and MP3 SX, which upgrades standard stereo mp3 file to mp3 surround files.
Ensonido is a real-time post processing algorithm that allows users to play back MP3 Surround files in standard headphones. Ensonido was developed by the Fraunhofer Society. It simulates the natural reception of surround sound by the human ear, which usually receives tones from surrounding loudspeakers and from reflections and echoes of the listening room. The out-of-head localization achieved that way increases the listening comfort noticeably in contrast to conventional stereo headphone listening with its in-head localization of all sounds. In version 3.0 of the Fraunhofer IIS MP3 Surround Player, Ensonido is replaced with newer mp3HD
mp3 SX is a program that allows users to upgrade mp3 stereo files to MP3 Surround files. mp3 SX analyzes the existing natural ambience of the stereo material and plays it back through the rear channels. The sound sources remain in the front channels, but are played back through the Left, Center and Right channel, providing a stable front image even for off-sweet-spot listening. mp3 SX preserves the original stereo sound stage, creating additional surround envelopment, with only 15 kB/s additional information.
On its 5.5 release, Nullsoft Winamp has included the MP3 Surround format as a part of its integrated MPEG audio decoder (released October 10, 2007).
Winamp is a media player for Windows, macOS and Android, originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
As of 2 July 2008, with system software v2.40, PlayStation 3 supports MP3 Surround playback. [7]
The PlayStation 3 system software is the updatable firmware and operating system of the PlayStation 3. The base operating used by Sony for the Playstation 3 is a fork of both FreeBSD and NetBSD called CellOS.
Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The original WMA codec, known simply as WMA, was conceived as a competitor to the popular MP3 and RealAudio codecs. WMA Pro, a newer and more advanced codec, supports multichannel and high resolution audio. A lossless codec, WMA Lossless, compresses audio data without loss of audio fidelity. WMA Voice, targeted at voice content, applies compression using a range of low bit rates. Microsoft has also developed a digital container format called Advanced Systems Format to store audio encoded by WMA.
Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Originally named Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994, except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints; today, it is now also used for other applications such as TV broadcast, radio broadcast via satellite, digital video streaming, DVDs, Blu-ray discs and game consoles.
DVD-Audio is a digital format for delivering high-fidelity audio content on a DVD. DVD-Audio uses most of the storage on the disc for high-quality audio and is not intended to be a video delivery format. DVD-Audio has much higher audio quality than most video DVDs containing concert films or music videos.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.
WinDVD is a commercial video player and music player software for Microsoft Windows. It enables the viewing of DVD-Video movies on the user's PC. DVD-Video backups stored on hard disk can also be played. The player can also be used to play videos and audio/music files in other formats encoded with different codecs, for instance DivX, Xvid, Windows Media Video video and MP3 and AAC audio. Newer versions also support full Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD playback with menus, with CPRM DRM support.
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp, he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he is Professor of Electronic Media Technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brandenburg was significantly involved in the founding of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and currently serves as its director.
Dolby Laboratories, Inc. is an American company specializing in audio noise reduction and audio encoding/compression. Dolby licenses its technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers.
Matrix decoding is an audio technology where a small number of discrete audio channels are decoded into a larger number of channels on play back. The channels are generally, but not always, arranged for transmission or recording by an encoder, and decoded for playback by a decoder. The function is to allow multichannel audio, such as quadraphonic sound or surround sound to be encoded in a stereo signal, and thus played back as stereo on stereo equipment, and as surround on surround equipment – this is "compatible" multichannel audio.
High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496-3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC optimized for low-bitrate applications such as streaming audio. HE-AAC version 1 profile uses spectral band replication (SBR) to enhance the compression efficiency in the frequency domain. HE-AAC version 2 profile couples SBR with Parametric Stereo (PS) to enhance the compression efficiency of stereo signals. It is a standardized and improved version of the AACplus codec.
DTS, Inc. is an American company that makes multichannel audio technologies for film and video. Based in Calabasas, California, the company introduced its DTS technology in 1993 as a higher-quality competitor to Dolby Laboratories, incorporating DTS in the film Jurassic Park. The DTS product is used in surround sound formats for both commercial/theatrical and consumer-grade applications. It was known as The Digital Experience until 1995. DTS licenses its technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers.
Fraunhofer l3enc was the first public software able to encode PCM (.wav) files to the MP3 format. The first public version was released on July 13, 1994. This commandline tool was shareware and limited to 112 kbit/s. It was available for MS-DOS, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, NeXTstep and IRIX. A licence that allowed full use cost 350 Deutsche Mark, or about 250 US$.
WinPlay3 was the first real-time MP3 audio player for PCs running Windows, both 16-bit and 32-bit. Prior to this, audio compressed with MP3 had to be decompressed prior to listening. It was released by Fraunhofer IIS, creators of the MP3 format, on September 9, 1995. The latest version was released on May 23, 1997. Since then, the Fraunhofer Society has removed any trace and mention of WinPlay3 from their web sites. However, the software remains available by utilizing the Web Archive, or one of the below links.
MPEG Surround, also known as Spatial Audio Coding (SAC) is a lossy compression format for surround sound that provides a method for extending mono or stereo audio services to multi-channel audio in a backwards compatible fashion. The total bit rates used for the core and the MPEG Surround data are typically only slightly higher than the bit rates used for coding of the core. MPEG Surround adds a side-information stream to the core bit stream, containing spatial image data. Legacy stereo playback systems will ignore this side-information while players supporting MPEG Surround decoding will output the reconstructed multi-channel audio.
JetAudio is a shareware media player application for Microsoft Windows and Android which offers advanced playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats.
MPEG-H 3D Audio, specified as ISO/IEC 23008-3, is an audio coding standard developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to support coding audio as audio channels, audio objects, or higher order ambisonics (HOA). MPEG-H 3D Audio can support up to 64 loudspeaker channels and 128 codec core channels.
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