Has anybody else dabbled with this? It was officially released last Monday.



It's basically lossless MP3.

The interesting thing about it, is that it's backwards-compatible with regular MP3 players, whereas FLAC, Apple Lossless and other popular lossless codecs aren't.

It does this by encoding a regular MP3 file and then cramming the lossless version into the MP3 tag data. So, any regular MP3 player will stay play the lossy MP3 version but any player with the MP3HD dll installed will check the id3 tag and play the lossless version instead. It is sort of ingenious really.

You can download the CLI from here and use EAC to encode.

As a test, I encoded Around The World In A Day with a regular MP3 layer at 192kbs and the whole album came out at 255MB. That's comparable to FLAC sizes, but has the added bonus of being playable in any MP3 player.

I regularly archive CDs to FLAC and then burn the files to DVD data discs for storage. If I later feel like listening to them on my MP3 player, I have to re-encode to MP3, before adding to my player. It's a slight inconvenience, but not exactly arduous.

What do we all think about this? Presumably, if you use an id3 tag editor to delete and rewrite MP3 tags, the lossless data is removed irreversibly. Isn't the whole point of MP3 its small file size? The MP3HD files equate to roughly the same size as combined FLAC and MP3 files would, but have the advantage of universal compatibility. Is filesize no longer an issue, now that you can store 32GB of data on a chip the size of a fingernail?