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MP3 Goes Surround (Again)

By Wired Blogs January 4, 2006 Categories: Multimedia

In another attempt to get professional sound engineers to adopt an enhanced stereo and multi-channel surround standard for MP3 audio, the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has released two new MP3 surround formats. The UK Register has the story today.

The two new formats, MP3 SX and Ensonido, encode audio so that it presents itself as accurately as possible on surround-sound systems and on 2-channel stereo systems. Both of the formats are “containers” for surround-sound MP3 audio standards that devices and web services can adopt. MP3 SX and Ensonido are enhanced stereo formats that will represent multi-channel presentations more faithfully than standard 2-channel stereo audio played back on 5.1 or 6.1 channel systems.

Try out the software at http://www.all4mp3.com/

The most viable multi-channel audio format for the web is still FLAC, which can handle 6 channels of audio. But the compression ratio for FLAC isn’t even close to what MP3 is capable of. Both of these new MP3 formats were offered up when it was clear that nobody was interested in adopting Fraunhofer’s MP3 Pro multi-channel format. MP3 Pro was released in 2001 and hasn’t had too many takers.

[link via digg.com]

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