Well, it seems that the folks at Thompson have been busy little engineers. They have released a ‘lossless’ version of the ubiquitous MP3 codec. The greatest benefit of the MP3 codec has been it’s role as lowest-common-demonator when it comes to compressed music formats. It is supported on every PC, Mac and most every linux computer on the planet not to mention every portable music player and most modern phones.

However, audio quality has never been a hallmark of MP3 compression; several other encoding schemes produce ‘better’ audio reproduction at the same, or lower, bitrates/filesize; Windows Media, Ogg/Vorbis and AAC are prime examples. At the high end of the scale have been the lossless codecs such as FLAC , APE  and SHN that regenerate exact copies of the original audio waveform at the cost of greatly increased file sizes. However, all these lack broad support across platforms (PC, Mac, Linux) and devices.

So what’s a listener to do? Do you trade broad device/software support for reduced audio quality or high quality but limited playback options?

You could take the approach that nutjobs like me take is to do both. When I buy a new CD I encode it to both MP3 and FLAC. I use the MP3 version for playback on iTunes and the higher quality FLAC version on my lLinux based entertainment system. Yes, it takes up lots of disk space and can be a pain to manage (applying metadata for example is a major PITA). Enter MP3HD.

At first glance MP3HD looks like just another lossless codec but the slipped in a little surprise. When an MP3HD encoder processes a file it generates a lossless version and a high bitrate standard MP3 in the same file. The result is a file that plays both on iTunes and portable players (standard MP3) as well as high-end playback devices in lossless format.  Nice.

They have adopted the ‘gracefully degrade’ design philosophy. If a playback device/software is capable of lossless playback it does it. However, if it is not it will play the standard MP3 instead. The other lossless formats are not backwards compatable; FLAC and Apple Lossless require specific support for those formats or they don’t play at all.

The gotcha (there’s always a ‘gotcha’) is that the files are much bigger than a standard MP3 but less than an standard MP3 + a FLAC file.

I’m going to give it a go in my encoding workflow. I’m not going to bother re-encoding my existing tracks but baring anything nasty I’ll may use it in place of FLAC for future encodes.

Of course, this assumes there is support for it within the OSS tools/players I use — more on that later I guess.

For more info. and software downloads visit Thompson’s site.