Hydrogenaudio Forums > Compress MP3 and MP3Pro by 20% losslessly?

Full Version: Compress MP3 and MP3Pro by 20% losslessly?

Hydrogenaudio Forums > Lossy Audio Compression > MP3 > MP3 - General

jetpower

Apr 28 2006, 15:28

Hi,
I did not know if to create a new topic or just post in one of mp3packer threads but I figured it has to be important.

Somewhere on the Internet

I found information about this software called SoundSlimmer. They claim the following:

QUOTE

Current version of SoundSlimmer losslessly compresses Mp3 and Mp3Pro files averaging 20% less file size, while general purpose archivers are capable to reduce file to 1-2%.

and how? this is what they say

QUOTE

SoundSlimmer works with audio data only utilizing certain specifics of digital sound signals to losslessly slim the audio content.
---and---
The core of the SoundSlimmer is a semantic approach to the data that represented music and correlation analysis of spectral data patterns called sound genes .

http://www.soundslimmer.com/
You can download the software there, too. The software can be downloaded as 30-day trial (valid e-mail needed).

-
I tried it with a few files. On first three *.mp3s I got an average 10% reduction in size, but on the forth (one hour-long speech 56kbps) mp3 file it exceeded 20%

. The newly created files got an *.mpz extension. So their claim doesn't seem that far off.
I did not check if the software decodes properly, however.

So, is it really a revolution in mp3 compression?

goodnews

Apr 28 2006, 15:52

Looks promising.

If it works as promised, and they say future versions are planned to work for AAC, AACPlus and MPEG 4 audio, this should be a winner and affect the future of compressed audio in a substantial way. Maybe MPEG and/or Coding Technologies would want to license this company's patents/code for inclusion in a future enhanced version of MP3, AAC, AACPlus, MPEG 4 audio, etc.

Since they say their software will put it back to bit for bit identical of the original MP3 also, this should be interesting to test if anyone has the time and tools for it. I hope someone either proves this works or exposes it for not working. Interesting theory - sound genomes...

skamp

Apr 28 2006, 16:03

Infima 2: Return of the Scam?

jetpower

Apr 28 2006, 16:19

QUOTE(skamp @ Apr 29 2006, 12:03 AM)

Infima 2: Return of the Scam?

Did you test it? I don't think it can be compared to Infima. For example it's only a 600kb file.

skamp

Apr 28 2006, 16:37

It also requires you to give your email address before you can download their program. Thanks, but no thanks.

Shade[ST]

Apr 28 2006, 16:48

QUOTE(skamp @ Apr 28 2006, 06:37 PM)

It also requires you to give your email address before you can download their program. Thanks, but no thanks.

Tried giving 2 email addresses 20 minutes ago, still no program (or URL) in my inbox.

guruboolez

Apr 28 2006, 16:59

I tried, and it seems to work.
6 files were compressed; gain=15%
Then I decompressed the mpz files, and compared the result with the original: bit-to-bit identical. It's definitely not comparable to the Infima April joke.

What I didn't checked is if the app is working like mafuka and if it stores the spared data somewhere on the HDD

Anyway, if this process would be interesting on small flash players, I fear that it's near useless otherwise (or maybe for filesharing?).

EDIT:

Wow:
http://audiotests.free.fr/temp/soundslimer.png

Original files were 8kbps "ghost" LAME encodings
(I'm using them for tagging purpose on a second computer)

goodnews

Apr 28 2006, 17:04

QUOTE

' date='Apr 28 2006, 04:48 PM' post='387364']

QUOTE(skamp @ Apr 28 2006, 06:37 PM)

It also requires you to give your email address before you can download their program. Thanks, but no thanks.

Tried giving 2 email addresses 20 minutes ago, still no program (or URL) in my inbox.

Look in your spam filter, that is where GMAIL put my E-mail from them with the download link and authorization/unlock registration code. Got the E-mail in a minute or so after signing up on their site, but those nasty spam filters in Gmail caught it.

Thundik81

Apr 28 2006, 17:09

CODE

SoundSlimmer development team:

Algorithms: D. Vatolin

Dmitry S. Vatolin : http://graphics.cs.msu.su/en/people/index.html
Real lossless compression, real improvement

Paper (in russian) : http://www.compression.ru/dv/course/compr_audio.pdf

Shade[ST]

Apr 28 2006, 18:21

QUOTE(guruboolez @ Apr 28 2006, 06:59 PM)

What I didn't checked is if the app is working like mafuka and if it stores the spared data somewhere on the HDD

Try moving the archives to another computer and decompressing them. Then, move the original files, and bit-compare. You might want to try with different content, too. (eg. a real mp3)

Demetris

Apr 28 2006, 19:58

I run a test on 10 files encoded by LAME 3.97b2 -V 0 --vbr-new
After decompression, MD5 hashes match.

CODE

Test system:          Win XP Pro SP2, AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Program version:      SoundSlimer 1.04.001

Total time:           1:08:24
Compression time:     0:09:07                           [ 7,5 ]
Decompression time:   0:08:21                           [ 8,2 ]

Original size:        122.742.332 bytes
Encoded size:         107.246.467 bytes                 [ 87% ]

FILES

Kind hearted woman blues (Take 1) (R. Johnson)          [ 84% ]
La vie antérieure (H. Duparc - B. Kruysen & N. Lee)     [ 86% ]
Prélude No. 17 Ab - Allegretto (F. Chopin - M. Pollini) [ 86% ]
Sister Ray (The Velvet Underground)                     [ 86% ]
Tom the model (Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man)               [ 86% ]
Vénus callipyge (G. Brassens)                           [ 87% ]
Allegro energico... (G. Mahler, Sym. No. 6 - C. Abbado) [ 88% ]
Milk it (Nirvana)                                       [ 88% ]
Dancing queen (ABBA)                                    [ 89% ]
Squirrel song (Shellac)                                 [ 89% ]

The program is 602kB and installs cleanly (monitored with Total Uninstall 2.35).

Here is a quote from the latest issue of Squeeze Chart (Edition 2006 04 02) by Stephan Busch.
(Download here: http://www.maximumcompression.com/benchmarks/benchmarks.php)

QUOTE

Sound Slimmer 1.04.001 (06.07.2005) - a very very cool lossless! recompressor for MP3 and mp3PRO audio files, capable of reducing every MP3 song from 12 % to 46% without loosing quality; without cheating; without deleting; reaching new world record on MP3 testset, and all MP3 files I compressed with this demo available at www.soundslimmer.com could be easily extracted bit by bit; even checksums matched.

Despite that, Sound Slimmer handled MP3 files created with all known encoders on the market, accepted mono, stereo and joint stereo formats at all imaginable CBR bitrates and VBR encoded titles.

MP3's containing newer music are usually reduced by 12%, music from the 80's by 20% and most classic or silent relaxation titles up to 36 to 46%.

haregoo

Apr 28 2006, 20:01

QUOTE(Shade[ST @ Apr 29 2006, 09:21 AM)

QUOTE(guruboolez @ Apr 28 2006, 06:59 PM)

What I didn't checked is if the app is working like mafuka and if it stores the spared data somewhere on the HDD

Try moving the archives to another computer and decompressing them. Then, move the original files, and bit-compare. You might want to try with different content, too. (eg. a real mp3)

Completely matched on separate machine.

It's looks promising.

Edit:As I think it as lossless compression like 7z, coding speed is relatively slow in my opinion.
but compression performance is very good.

chrisgeleven

Apr 28 2006, 20:59

I want to know how they did this.

guruboolez

Apr 29 2006, 03:35

QUOTE

' date='Apr 29 2006, 01:21 AM' post='387389']
Try moving the archives to another computer and decompressing them.

I can't do it for the moment. I searched on the whole HDD for all files created in the last 24 hours, and the tool didn't return any bad result. No, this tool is really amazing. I tried with others MP3 files (-V5 encodings) and the gain was always ~15%. For three hours of music at ~130 kbps, I spared 20 MB. No bad

Garf

Apr 29 2006, 03:52

QUOTE(chrisgeleven @ Apr 29 2006, 04:59 AM)

I want to know how they did this.

The linked paper is in Russian, so I can't make sense of it, and it looks like a general overview of existing things anyway.

But I can make some very educated guesses. It probably works in the same way as the lossless JPEG recompressors, i.e.:

1) Replace huffman coding in MP3/MP3Pro with arithmetic coding
2) Replace the scalefactors which are independent in any frame by versions that are differentially coded in time. (Perhaps try the same for M/S data, code groups, etc)
3) Use predicition on MDCT data.

The "problem" of all these techniques is the increased decoding complexity (compare how fast you can decompress an mpz to how fast you can decode an MP3).

hlloyge

Apr 29 2006, 04:04

More that that, I want that incorporated in lame encoder by default

H.

(edit) Oh, I see, it would be very complex to decode these streams... but it could be useful as an option.
I know it isn't free, but this is just wishful thinking...

seanyseansean

Apr 29 2006, 04:09

QUOTE(hlloyge @ Apr 29 2006, 11:04 AM)

More that that, I want that incorporated in lame encoder by default

But it wouldn't be an mp3 anymore.

guruboolez

Apr 29 2006, 04:09

Including that in LAME would break the compatibility with thousands of hardware and software decoders.

SirGrey

Apr 29 2006, 04:28

QUOTE

The linked paper is in Russian, so I can't make sense of it, and it looks like a general overview of existing things anyway.

This paper contains a general information on audio coding shemes for younger students, no more.
Something I didn't hear about is hybrid coding - an attempt to use wavelets, FT and noise shaping simultaneously to get better results on low bitrates, but as I understand paper, this tehnique failed.

hlloyge

Apr 29 2006, 11:46

QUOTE(guruboolez @ Apr 29 2006, 12:09 PM)

Including that in LAME would break the compatibility with thousands of hardware and software decoders.

I noticed I wrote nonsense

I had a blonde moment.

H.

Sebastian Mares

Apr 29 2006, 13:21

I wouldn't like to see this in LAME, I would like to see it in PowerArchiver, WinRAR and/or 7-Zip.

Phobos

Apr 29 2006, 13:30

it looks very promising imho...

for a PC is a no brainer, and i believe most Symbian Compatible Celullar phones might already have enough horsepower to decode mpz.

The biggest downfall is its popularity, look at mpc... it has still not a lot of hardware support and has been around for years. I agree with goodnews that it should be licensed by the big players like mp3 or aac to have a chance in the market.

Anyway it might take years to become popular.

I know i wrote a lot of "mights", but thats the way things have been behaving lately in the audio scene

smok3

Apr 29 2006, 15:07

whats are the decoding times?

rutra80

Apr 29 2006, 22:02

Look what for example WinRK, StuffIt, or PAQ can do with JPEGs.
I wonder if soundslimer replaces noisless techniques used in MP3 encoding with its own ones (optimized more for compression ratio than speed) as Garf said, or maybe it is just optimized for squeezing the last bits from huffman-encoded bitstreams. Can someone try to rename some OggVorbis or AAC file to .mp3 and try to feed soundslimer with it?

haregoo

Apr 29 2006, 22:27

QUOTE(rutra80 @ Apr 30 2006, 01:02 PM)

Can someone try to rename some OggVorbis or AAC file to .mp3 and try to feed soundslimer with it?

Vorbis : It did not work.
LC-AAC : Compression ratio was about 98%.

But if it works well with AAC, Apple will be interested in this technology for saving bandwidth which iTMS consume.

Supacon

Apr 30 2006, 00:49

This is interesting, but not expressly useful or shocking. MP3 is getting pretty antiquated, so of course one could design an algorithm that compresses superior to MP3, and improves upon its weaknesses. But of course, it's not MP3 anymore, but a new codec.

Probably the only really useful application that springs to mind is for P2P sharing. Perhaps (depending on the licensing and such) players like foobar could incorporate support for this format.

And yeah as Sebastian Mares said, it'd be very nice to have this built-into WinRAR and the like.

Sebastian Mares

Apr 30 2006, 11:43

QUOTE

Hi Sebastian,

Thank you for the interest in the soundslimmer technology. The technology is based on principals of Sound Genome Theory (to obtain preliminary info you may simply Google phrase “Sound Genome Theory” or go directly to http://www.fidelityamplifier.com/Sound_Gen...ory_page_1.html. The theory was developed by a network of scientist which collaboration resulted in many advances in digital audio coding.

If you interested in learning more about principals that SoundSlimmer is based on, we recommend you to evaluate another technology called “SX Fidelity Amplifier” we recently released, that is based on other principals of the Sound Genome Theory. It increases the quality of the decoded signal without increasing the original encoding bitrate. It operates in conjunction with any audio decoding process and provides a “restoration boost” to audio data and delivers a sound output that is similar to the one produced by a higher bitrate signal or a signal with a wider frequency spectrum. If you interested to download the evaluation version, it is located here:
http://www.fidelityamplifier.com/evaluation.html

As you correctly stated Huffman coding is not very efficient, so as a part of the theory advances, we have replaced it with our own proprietary method of coding. In addition to that current evaluation version of SoundSlimmer employs several other technologies including fractal based analysis for the MDCT prediction.

The evaluation version supports MP3 format, and compression of MP3-Pro, AAC, HE-AAC, OGG, WMA, QMF, MPEG-4 audio can be custom built as required. The actual compression ratio depends on the bitrate of the original MP3 file and the actual sound structure of the compressed music.

Both SoundSlimmer and SX Fidelity Amplifier are designed to be highly customizable and can be incorporated into any existing encoding-decoding scheme.

Best Regards,
SoundSlimmer support Team

QUOTE

-----Original Message-----
From: Sebastian Mares
Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2006 3:38 AM
Subject: Technology Used

Hello!

I am just wondering how exactly you are achieving this additional compression. Is it something similar to that what lossless JPEG compressors use, i.e. replacing huffman coding with arithmetic coding and using prediction on MDCT data?

Regards,
Sebastian Mares

Garf

Apr 30 2006, 13:43

That's what you get when the marketing department answers your technical questions

Eli

Apr 30 2006, 13:59

This would be much more interesting for lossless, getting 20% better then flac, wavepack, ape, ect would be a breakthrough.

Sebastian Mares

Apr 30 2006, 14:02

Lossless encoding already uses some of the techniques described here.

NeoRenegade

Apr 30 2006, 22:21

QUOTE(Sebastian Mares @ Apr 30 2006, 04:02 PM)

Lossless encoding already uses some of the techniques described here.

Yeah, probably every last one that is applicable.

sven_Bent

May 1 2006, 01:27

can the mpz be played diretly form winamp ?

cabbagerat

May 1 2006, 02:10

QUOTE(Garf @ Apr 30 2006, 11:43 AM)

That's what you get when the marketing department answers your technical questions

That's true. But aren't most source coding methods more advanced than Huffman covered by patents (Arithmetic coding, i know, is a field landmined with patents)? Maybe they are just covering themselves because they are using a patented method without licence.

Destroid

May 1 2006, 12:49

http://www.rctechnologies.co.uk/

QUOTE

Company has finished development of the first generation of its Sound Restoration Engine called "Radiant SoundT" that rebuilds fidelity of the digital audio. Now any stream that lost its original sound quality can be automatically processed via Radiant SoundT Engine and receive substantial sound quality improvement.

This company called Rainbow Coherent Technologies, LLP that developed SoundSlimmer technology has several interesting projects. Sorry for OT, but if the technology quoted above does what I think it does I know the question about sound restoration has come up in the forums before.

Eli

May 1 2006, 13:12

QUOTE(Sebastian Mares @ Apr 30 2006, 04:02 PM)

Lossless encoding already uses some of the techniques described here.

Yes, but we dont really know what they are using. Probably as guessed...

Shade[ST]

May 1 2006, 13:54

Did anyone try feeding an mp3packer mp3 to this program, to see if it gets any more efficiency or no?

birdie

May 1 2006, 21:14

This algorithm/program is wonderful and it has real accomplishments but instead I'd like the author to engage in optimizing lossless audio compression algorithms. First of all no mp3 player producer would use such compression algorithm in foreseeable future and then we all know the inherited weaknesses of MP3 itself so one should get rid of such files completely rather than trying to recompress them even further.

Firon

May 2 2006, 00:24

Well, it would be useful for distribution on a PC, at least, to save bandwidth (and space if you have players that can play it back)... mpz your collection then send it to a friend, or something. Kind of like raring them.

smack

May 2 2006, 03:22

QUOTE(rutra80 @ Apr 30 2006, 05:02 AM)

So, who is going to add specific support for MP3 and Vorbis files to PAQ8?

PAQ8 is available under GNU GPL and already has specific support for JPEG files. Could this method be used in a similar (?) way for the mentioned audio file formats?

R4Z3R

May 3 2006, 14:01

Hi you all,

so this is my first post on HA!

in my freetime, iam spending time into programming, mainly into vb6 although it isn't as "hardcore" as delphi/c.
one of my projects was a tool which can analyze the compression rate of files.

so i did a run with both a .mp3 and a mpz. file.... here are the results:

mp3: for me, the hc encoding seems to be relatively good implemented
mpz: as it was said before, ss squezzes really every bit of ballast out of the file, th hc implementaion seems to
XTREMELY good. while there are about 5% (i cant explain the unit, they depend on the structure of my prog

)
left of "possible compression", that factor is going to be 0 (!) in the mpz file!

i know, that all are not real news, but i hope it was interessting for those whoare interesstet in the technical backrounds....

PS: my orthography will be better in the next posts

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