MPEG-4 ALS (Audio Lossless Coding) is Ready
Posted by Mark Nelson on 27th December 2005 | Permanent Link
According to this press release, NTT has been working for three years on a lossless audio coding standard to add to MPEG-4. According to the ISO, the voting is done and MPEG-4 ALS is now the real thing.
Here are some of the nifty things you can expect from this standard, in addition to the fact that it provides lossless compression:
- Sampling rates of up to 192 kHz (44.1 kHz for CD)
- Various integer PCM formats up to 32 bit per sample (16 bit for CD)
- 32-bit floating point data in the IEEE754 format (integer for CD)
- Up to 65536 channels (2 channels for CD)
I think we’re all going to love it!
But, sadly, I see no word on licensing terms. I assume there will the standard licensing pool, but no news on who will be administering it and what rates will be.