Here are some observations on mp3HD from the developer of foobar2000 <
http://www.foobar2000.org> from a thread at hydrogenaudio.org <
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7054 8&hl=>:
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Useless format:
* The lossless part is stored in ID3v2 tags.
* Size of ID3v2 tags is limited to 256MB by specifications; as a result, lossless part of an mp3hd file can't be larger than 256MB.
I wonder what those people will think of next. Maybe resurrect VQF or something.
Addendum:
Current tagging software isn't prepared to deal with this kind of situation, so you're going to see various disturbing behaviors such as:
* Very slow tag updates (near-full-file-rewrite with each edit).
* Heavy memory usage of tag editors.
* Retagging stripping correction data.
* Tag editing or even reading failures when approaching the 256MB limit because software will try to put each ID3v2 frame in a single memory block and allocating a single block of such size is likely to fail in 32-bit address space because of fragmentation issues.
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The two main limitations that I see are:
- "Size of ID3v2 tags is limited to 256MB by specifications; as a result, lossless part of an mp3hd file can't be larger than 256MB." While this doesn't mean much to your average end user who just downloads albums as a collection of individual tracks, it makes it impossible to encode image files (i.e. entire CD ripped to a single file with a cue sheet).
but this is the fatal flaw, IMO:
- "The lossless part is stored in ID3v2 tags" and therefore "Retagging [can remove] correction data." This means that any application that modifies the ID3 tag and doesn't keep/can't deal with the lossless tag data can erase the lossless part of the file. I know I wouldn't be too happy about losing the lossless data just because I added some album art or changed the genre.
Yes, theoretically "all" MP3 tagging programs/processes could eventually be modified to correctly handle the added (unusually large) tags, but until that happened, you would have a lot of very confused, pissed-off customers.
Also, quite a few stand-alone MP3 playback devices (DVD players, in-car CD players, etc.) already have problems dealing with some ID3 tags due to "idiosyncrasies" in tag writing software and the inclusion of "non-standard" (or at least rarely-used) fields - I can't imagine that adding a 20+ MB tag field would improve matters any...
While it may be true that people wouldn't mind longer downloads (mp3HD's compression ratio is quite a bit worse than FLAC, even when the lossy portion is only 128kb/s), I'm pretty sure they would mind very much that they could only fit 1/3-1/5 as much music on their MP3 player (or burned MP3 CDs) as they used to. Once again, theoretically "all" media device management software could eventually be modified to discard the lossless tag data when transferring MP3s to the devices or burning MP3 CDs (and if you just drop folders on the player, you would have to do it all "by hand"), but personally I would much rather see something along the lines of being able to download Apple Lossless files from iTunes for listening on my home system, and then having the option (which already exists for the Shuffle) to encode to AAC on-the-fly when I sync my iPod.
