Will we ever see an option where we can encode a song to mp3 format and have it be lossless?

Since mp3 format is one of the most wildly used formats I'm surprised there isn't an option for lossless comprerssion. It sucks having only ALAC as the only option for lossless compression for the iPod.

If you have iPod which is supported by Rockbox you are not forced to use ALAC.

the battery life, stability and possibility of bricking my ipod kinda turn me away from rockbox

No, that is not possible.

Battery life is greatly improved now. Better than stock on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd gen iPods. Possibly better than stock on 4ths as well - don't have solid tests on that. at least 80% of stock on Video and Nano.

Stability - depends on your usage pattern. Varies from very good to near perfect.

Bricking - about frickin' impossible on the iPods - very well designed by Apple on this. No cases of bricked iPods due to Rockbox.

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Why is it not possible?

Is there a supernatural force that stops the programmers of LAME from putting in a switch that does this?

No, just the small problem that the resulting file wouldn't be an mp3 anymore (and definitely wouldn't play in your iPod).

Moderation: Please keep quotations at a reasonable level. Only quote what you're replying to, and save my scrollwheel some wear.

Why couldn't it be an mp3? Can one not turn a wav file into an mp3 without making the mp3 lossy? Just make it into the mp3 file structure?

Moderation: Please keep quotations at a reasonable level. Only quote what you're replying to, and save my scrollwheel some wear.

It's just not that simple.

First, wouldn't what you propose just be a PCM audio track with an MP3 header? It wouldn't exactly be 'compressed' much if at all... (as MP3 compression in inherently LOSSY, thus applying it at all makes the output NOT LOSSLESS)

Second, any 'lossless' mp3 would be WAAAY over the 320kbps max bitrate. Almost all decoders choke on files with bitrates higher than 320, the official specs decree that as the format's max bitrate for standard files so that's the highest bitrate most decoders are designed to ever expect to see. The so-called 'free-format' MP3 files with bitrates greater than 320 never caught on because, among other issues, barely anything could actually PLAY them. I'm sorry, but your dreams of super-high bitrate MP3s with near universal playback support already crashed and burned years ago.

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Right! There is some information on how the MP3 encoder works here. The encoder works by analyzing the "sound" rather than the data. Lossless CODECs analyze and compress the underlying data. Once you understand something about how the encoder/decoder works, you can see why it's impossible to make a lossless MP3 CODEC that accurately reconstructs the bytes in a WAV (or other PCM) file.

Yes! It's called MPEG (The Motion Pictures Expert Group). They control the MP3 spec.* They could change the spec, but all MP3 players would require new software/firmware in order to play the new files.

LAME is open-source, so if you knew how to program you could add a lossless option to a version LAME. But, the resulting file would not be MP3.



* The specification is controlled by MPEG, but the patent/licensing rights are owned and controlled by private entities Fraunhofer & Thomson.

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trolling imo ;D

A hybrid MP3 and lossless correction file would be difficult, if not impossible, because the way MP3 changes the waveform of the audio so that what you hear sounds mostly like the original. The hybrid-lossless system implemented in WavPack is possible only because WavPack lossy files are close enough to the original waveform, IIRC.



For more information, see this thread here: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....8&hl=hybrid .

And why would the MPEG, since they've moved on anyway to stuff that will go in an MP4 container -- MPEG-4 ALS and MPEG-4 SLS?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Lossless_Coding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_SLS

And, from the end-users' standpoint, yet another lossless format would be a pointless addition since they already have the well-established and widely-used FLAC format:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

Most would be uninterested in anything else.

Okay so the original question, why not a lossless mp3, is not practical. But let's also say that if it were practical then there could be some real benefits to it. If people did not have to replace any of their existing hardware or learn new tools or terminology, but simply, as storage became cheaper and cheaper, start getting and encoding mp3's that did not compromise the original sound in the slightest. This would be a painless transition.

Of course, in an ideal world music would simply be piped into our heads without an physical medium at all.

...? We've determined it is impractical, so where is this world where it would be practical that you started to describe?



I think just before we got to the solar system with this ideal world on the other side of the galaxy, there would be the planet where pre-installed standard media players--like Windows Media Player and iTunes--would support off-hand but still popular codecs like FLAC, Vorbis, and WavPack, as well as other archival setups, like CUE and *-images.

NO.

1. MP3 was designed as lossy and heavily relies on transformations that are lossy ... no way to "remove the loss"
2. You "can" hack LAME to "remove the loss" - but it's pointless, you will get either a uncompressed WAV with wrong header/frames, or a FLAC or WAVPACK with wrong header, or whatever broken file, but it definitely won't play in any "MP3 player"
3. Seems you don't know what "MP3" is: it is a proprietary and lossy audio compression algorithm
4. There is also digital audio beyond MP3
5. If you need lostless, why don't you use just FLAC, WAVPACK or TAK ? All those are free and open source (TAK hopefully soon), unlike MP3
6. You should "push" the audio player (not "MP3-player") manufacturers to add support for FLAC, WAVPACK, TAK and OGG VORBIS, rather than LAME devels to "remove the loss"

Bourne wrote:



If "nothing" else, they are considerably smarter and compress better ... remember that WiNZip 13 just uses WAVPACK ... thus the "good" results are due to the WAVPACK algorithm, not the Deflate (standard of ZIP) algorithm

RAR (and I think ACE, UHA too) included "multimedia" compression well before WinZip.