What about MP3pro!?
Reply #4 – 2003-01-16 07:31:58
There are quality in MP3pro?! Yes i now it's not free...but...it will replace MP3 in a near future? Well, for me it already has replaced LAME for my homepage sound files... It's only useful for bitrates up to ~96-112 kbps, because above that the SBR technology makes things worse again than using plain MP3. By the way, Coding Technology is aware of that and does not promote any such rumours as "beats LAME -aps at 128 kbps or even lower" and so on. They express the estimated sound quality improvements very clearly and unmistakenly on their website and even in the help file that comes with the free player/encoder from Thomson ("64 kbps sounds a little bit better than an standard MP3 file at 96 kbps"). They also do not suggest to push mp3PRO's bitrate up to 128 kbps and more with the variable bitrate settings in order to compete with standard formats at that bitrate, but they limit the usable bitrates to 96 kbps CBR in MusicMatch JukeBox instead, as far as I know. So mp3PRO can easily replace low bitrate MP3 encodings because of its much higher quality, if you don't have to rely on an available portable player right now. But probably there will be some in the near future, because RCA is already late on its time schedule for a flash update of their Lyra players (last Christmas). Another question is the long-term future of this format, because it will probably be replaced with aacPlus from the same company as soon as they (and the MPEG working group) are ready to release the codec. As mp3PRO is not part of any MPEG standard (and will never be), its basis for a further industry development is much smaller than for aacPlus that will be a core part of the worldwide MPEG-4 standard. But until this happens, you can of course use mp3PRO for low bitrate encodings happily like me. By the way, there will at last be an input plugin for Winamp 3.x in February, says Coding Technologies, so these problems will also be a past-time story then.