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.
December 29th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
Yawn. Why would ANYONE want to compress audio in any way that wasn’t lossless? The bandwidth is so weenie that it is a non-issue in almost all applications (yes even including cell phones). Too little too late. This should have been part of the standard from day 1 - and the licensing cost - unknown….
This standard has done more to shoot itself in the foot then any other one I have even known of. It is too late for MPEG4 - the world is moving on.
Several years ago - in the words of Jake Lamotta - “they could have been a contenda” - now it is all catch up and there are lots of alternatives.
As bandwidth increases in virtually every app/media type and storage cost continues its steady march toward $0, lossy technology makes no sense - audio or video. Nice they finally woke up.