mp3HD

» see all4mp3.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

mp3HD came out of Thomson in March 2009, which is to say it came out of the company that had spent fifteen years collecting MP3 licensing money alongside Fraunhofer. The idea was one file holding two recordings. The lossy MP3 stream sat where it always sat and played on any device made since 1998. The lossless data went into the ID3v2 tag, the metadata block that older software skips without complaint. Install the right decoder and the same file gave you the CD back, bit for bit.

The arithmetic is where it falls apart. An mp3HD file averaged somewhere between 500 and 900 kbit/s depending on how dense the music was, which put it in the same weight class as FLAC and Apple Lossless and made it four or five times the size of the 192 kbit/s MP3 everyone was actually trading. You paid the full lossless storage cost to get a file that most players would render as a normal MP3. The compatibility that made it safe to adopt was the same property that made adopting it invisible.

Technicolor, as Thomson became, kept working on it after launch. There was a command-line toolkit for Windows, Mac and Linux, and a DirectShow filter so that Windows Media Player could decode the lossless half. Nero Recode could write the format. The tooling was real. The problem was that by 2009 the audience for a proprietary lossless codec had already chosen a free one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

Read the 2009 press and the argument is always about anxiety. You rip your CDs once. If you rip to MP3 you have thrown away data you cannot get back; if you rip to FLAC your phone will not play it. mp3HD said rip once and decide later, because the file works either way.

It was an honest answer to a real problem, and the problem was already being solved by storage getting cheap. The format shipped in the same year a terabyte drive stopped being a purchase you thought about.

~ why nobody shipped it ~

FLAC was free and already built into every piece of ripping software that mattered. Apple Lossless was inside iTunes, which meant it was inside the default music workflow for a very large number of people. mp3HD was proprietary and required its own decoder before it did anything the user could see. Hydrogenaudio's write-up is blunt about the rest: the codec was Windows-centric and did not have much software support even on Windows, with close to nothing available for it elsewhere.

~ the last capture ~

The ending is not announced anywhere. all4mp3.com, the site that hosted the specification and the encoder, was serving its normal navigation on 15 March 2013 with mp3HD still listed between mp3 and mp3 Surround. On 24 April 2013 the same URL returned a 503, and the archive records nothing but 503s after that, through 2014 and beyond. mp3hd.com, which had been forwarding to all4mp3 since 2009, was a parked page by October 2016. Nobody wrote a farewell because there was no audience to write it for.

I was downloading mp3s in internet cafes between 2002 and 2005 and on a TTNet line after that, so the format war over how to store music is one I lived through on the consumer side. mp3HD missed me entirely, and the reason is the date. By 2009 the question had stopped being how small a file could get and started being whether you needed the file at all. A lossless wrapper around an MP3 is an answer to a 2002 problem, delivered to people who were about to stop keeping files.

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