[Empeg-general] Re: Mpeg +? who has heard of it?

[Paul Wayper]

This seems a good message to reply to to say:

So how does it work?

I.e. what is the difference between MP+ and MPEG audio layer 3?  Is it the same old ISO spec. with larger compression bitrates bolted on the top?  Does it do something actually new?

The first half of <A HREF="http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/73884/audiocoder_eng.html" target="_new">this page</A> seems to be an explanation of how MPEG layer 3 audio works, and the latter half has quite general and somewhat expansive claims.  For instance "Lossless encoding using better Huffman codes" - which is basically technobabble as the Huffman coding is only done on the coefficients of the DCT - after all the 'unhearable' information is thrown out - and choosing a better Huffman code table would result in (slightly) increased compression, not lossless coding.  Other claims on this and other pages are merely codec claims - 2x speed (on a pentium 3-750, surprise surprise), better quality for the same size, and so on.  I haven't seen anything that tells me anything useful about the format itself, because there's nothing in the technical description that I can see that applies to only the MP+ format - although I may be missing it in all the jargon.

Anyone got a better grip on it?

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