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What wen't wrong with MP3?, Why wasn't MP2 pushed instead as the defacto codec?

Blujackaal

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Been looking up history that Fraunhofer in 1993 when they launched MP3, It was bit of joke. Like touting 128kbps with bad encoders like blade and more. But 3 MP2 encoders were transparent at 192kbps on more content, So I'm like why didn't they just push MP2 more?. Wikipedia said MUSICAM was pretty much HE MP2 that could sound good <160kbps but was mothballed.

Then Musepack shows up doing all that but was ignored in favour of LAME MP3. Which can break at 320kbps on samples that MPC, MP2 at 160k are transparent on. A lastest DBT put it at 192kbps at 4.9 a hair better than vorbis/AAC, Even Merzbow dosen't even phase the codec. What fun you could turn it into a semi lossless codec by using Q10 & Nmt at 32 which spits out ~850kbps files not sure if transcoding been tested for it encoder freaking out?. Yet MDCT ones don't gain much above 320k like Amir said in the past, Since them being more complex means more mistakes which is why 512k Opus/aac/vorbis, 480kbps MP3(free format) could die yet a 500 ~ 1300kbps MPC/MP2 won't in theory.
 

Sergei

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The three lineages of Layers (MPEG-1/2/2.5 Audio Layer I,II,III) were developed by different consortiums. Instead of trying to integrate them, or to give a preference to a single one, it was more practical to just let them all be, and for the consortiums to cross-license their patents protecting the heretofore proprietary algorithms used by the Layers.

The consortium working on the Layer III didn't have as tight security as the other two. Pieces of its reference code were either leaked or stolen. My guess is that if the reference code of either two was leaked or stolen first, the corresponding Layer would come to dominate the Internet instead, during the decade that followed.
 

somebodyelse

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It's easy to forget how much less storage space was available and how slow networks were back when MP3 was getting its toe hold. When it was released hard drives were still measured in MB, fans were noisy and sound cards weren't very good. By the late '90s drives in the low GB range were available at non-corporate prices, but internet access was still of the order of a 56kbps modem or 64kbps ISDN line for home users. MP3 was popular because it was 'good enough' for most people at lower bit rates that made it practical. By the time storage and networking progressed to the point that higher bit rates were practical MP3 was firmly established, and ubiquity maintained its position.
 

Trouble Maker

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It's easy to forget how much less storage space was available and how slow networks were back when MP3 was getting its toe hold. When it was released hard drives were still measured in MB, fans were noisy and sound cards weren't very good. By the late '90s drives in the low GB range were available at non-corporate prices, but internet access was still of the order of a 56kbps modem or 64kbps ISDN line for home users. MP3 was popular because it was 'good enough' for most people at lower bit rates that made it practical. By the time storage and networking progressed to the point that higher bit rates were practical MP3 was firmly established, and ubiquity maintained its position.

I was in college in MP3s golden age, the early naughts. I'm not going to assume anything about anyone's age here, but just say that anyone who wasn't deep into it probably doesn't have an intuitive understanding of how critical the size VS speed VS storage at the time was. But I hope a few of these annecodets will give some visceral image.

I went to school in a rural area without a large line coming to it. I think it might have had a few (2 or 3) T3s for a college with about 3,000 people, with I would guess roughly half living on campus. It could have even been just a few T1s but it's been long enough that I don't remember and don't want to exaggerate the situation. The prime example I can think of is a friend who had an external hard drive, but only had USB(1.x) and it had some speed transfer issues when trying to live read/play MP3s* and would sometimes stutter like a CD skipping. You were doing well technologically if you had some means to play lots MP3s* on the go. Solid state drives were small and very expensive so you could have maybe a few CDs worth on the average one. Really only viable for walking around, running, going for a workout. Mostly you were still better on a road trip having a binder of redbook CDs. Some aftermarket car stereos could play MP3s* directly from disc, but that was more rare until we were out of college. A friend had a Creative Nomad Jukebox, a device that looked like large portable CD player but was a hard disk based MP3* player. If you *clears throat waiting for someone to chastise* got a shared file external from the campus or even across campus the speeds were glacial at times. You would just start a download and go do something else. So mostly we shared amongst our fraternity since we had rewired it and installed a 100mb switch. It also helped that at the same time the RIAA started cracking down and also leaning on colleges to block the various file share services.

*Yes, these could usually do more than MP3s and might be more appropriately described as Portable Media Players, but let's be real, everyone but a statistically anomalously few number people only played MP3s on them.
 
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StefaanE

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but internet access was still of the order of a 56kbps modem or 64kbps ISDN line for home users
... and it was timed. In those early days it cost a lot of money to have a more or less functional Internet connection, because of the seconds and minutes being metered, we tended to establish a connection only when we had to access something. I well remember how my Internet bill was slashed when I moved from a double ISDN connection (128kb) to a 1Mb/s ADSL line. At that time, there was a cap on transmitted volume, so I still downed the connection when not absolutely necessary, and ran a cache to minimise downloads.
 

somebodyelse

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Some more perspective - the Rio PMP300 launched with 32MB of flash and a SmartMedia slot. I don't know what the biggest card available at the time was, but they never got more than 128MB. It could play MP2 as well as MP3, but with 128kbps giving you ~1 minute per MB hardly anyone would make the sacrifice. The Creative Jukebox had terrible battery life because it kept the HDD spinning all the time. The HanGo PJB100 would cache to RAM and spin down the drive until it was next needed, extending battery life considerably (so long as you were using an HDD that split the motor and logic power - you had to be very selective about HDDs when you upgraded to a bigger one...) This also meant a trade off between bitrate and battery life as the higher bit rate meant spinning up the HDD more often. It only did MP3 though - its storage indexing was intimately tied to the MP3 frames. It was also USB 1.1 - not bad by the standards of the day, but it took a while to upload a few albums.

I didn't think to mention modem or ISDN internet access being metered - it was a phone call, and subject to whatever charges the phone company applied where you were. Then there's mobile data - a GSM data connection was 9.6kbps and billed like a phone call. Apple's real innovation with the original iPhone was getting the phone companies to bundle unlimited data calls so people could use the data connection without worrying about a mounting phone bill.
 

Neddy

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Good questions, comments.
Hah. The good ol' days. I worked at a large (6000+) state agency, and nearly all the employees were using their work PCs to play (and rip, burn, etc ...) music CDs...not to mention fast 'internet access'. The desktop staff got a lot of expertise replacing CD drives that were spinning 8x40hrs per week.
 

Pio2001

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Then Musepack shows up doing all that but was ignored in favour of LAME MP3.

As far as I remember, it was rather Vorbis that replaced Musepack.
The sound quality was similar, but it was not clear if Musepack could one day be accused of patent infringement, while Vorbis had been design from the beginning to avoid such problems.
At that time, lossless was already becoming a good choice for people looking for the best audio quality.
 
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Blujackaal

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As far as I remember, it was rather Vorbis that replaced Musepack.
The sound quality was similar, but it was not clear if Musepack could one day be accused of patent infringement, while Vorbis had been design from the beginning to avoid such problems.
At that time, lossless was already becoming a good choice for people looking for the best audio quality.

Lossless won when over 128GB cards showed up. The biggest issue was HA members making excuses to not further tune the 192 ~ 512kbps area. Musepack never had this issue with using --nmt switch to bump stuff to 500kbps, The MPC devs had to make a new forum to avoid the <128kbps being transparent gang Hydrogenaudio has.

Since it turns out much of the 2005 DBT tests either refused to test it or bin people showing AAC/Vorbis being 4.00 & MPC being 5.00 at 128kbps. While spreading misinformation it only good at 200kbps.
 

LeftCoastTim

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Oh, nostalgia!

My first exposure to mp3 was the availability of l3enc [1]. Wikipedia says it came out in 1994, and was limited to 112kbps. The Blade encoder was the first "open source" encoder. Someone took the ISO reference code (which was for demonstration, neither made for music nor speed), and made some speedups. The good thing about blade was it was much faster, and could support bit rates higher than 112kbps.

High end PC's back then ran Windows 95 [2], had a Pentium chip running 100-200MHz [3], and had 16MB of RAM. I think I had a 500MB HDD, so no way to rip a whole CD. I think I had to record CD tracks via analog, because very few CD drives supported reading audio data directly. I remember CD rippers recommending specific models of CD readers that supported accurate audio streaming, which cost $500+ ($1k in today's money). Most people used the analog audio out, or "stitching" which some ripping software provided.

Musepack (MPC) initiated in 1997 [4], but didn't see wider usage until the 00's. By then, Napster (1999) was the thing, and mp3 ruled (hardware mp3 players 1999?). When the IPOD came out in 2001 with 5G storage (1,000 songs!), there was no room for musepack.

The pirate scene then was entirely mp3, between 64kbps-128kbps. Higher bit rates just wasn't popular. Some niche users used musepack (used to be mppenc. mpc term was later on), but mp3 at 192kbps was the "high quality", and lame was getting better every month.

Was musepack better? Yes, in every way. Did it take over the market? No, MP3 was already good enough, and compatibility with portable hardware players, and in-car players won. When I got an in-car CD player that would play mp3's written to CD that was the best thing. 650MB of songs per CD in the car. Those were the days!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3enc
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium#Pentium-branded_processors
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musepack
 
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anmpr1

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... and it was timed. In those early days it cost a lot of money to have a more or less functional Internet connection...
The only way I could afford to be on line was to upload/download text messages (there was no graphic information at the consumer level) over a 48K modem. It was so slow you could actually see the text on the screen as it downloaded. I used GEnie (General Electric Network Information Exchange). GE leased mainframe time during off hours for home users. An automated script uploaded and downloaded text. You paid by the minute. The idea of music streaming was something no one would have ever thought about back then.
 

infinitesymphony

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Shout-out to my 1998 Blade and Xing encoder homies using MP3.com and Scour.net. Such bad encoders but they were some of the only free choices at the time.

It was so slow you could actually see the text on the screen as it downloaded.
Blast from the past! My first experiences with BBSs were over a 2400 bps modem. The text load times were real.
 
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Blujackaal

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Was musepack better? Yes, in every way. Did it take over the market? No, MP3 was already good enough, and compatibility with portable hardware players, and in-car players won. When I got an in-car CD player that would play mp3's written to CD that was the best thing. 650MB of songs per CD in the car. Those were the days!

LAME MP3 is transparent at 80 ~ 160kbps on some music/samples which is awesome despite how weak MP3 is.
 

StefaanE

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You YOUNGSTERS! I used 2 300/1200 modems (not at the same time) before getting a 2400.
In the 1980ies I worked for a company that organised pari-mutual betting (a Totaliser/Tote or an OTB for you ‘Mercans) and we used “high-speed” modems (1200b/s). One of our techs would test the modem at the other end by whistling in the mouthpiece and fool the modem into connecting. It’s actually quite amazing what a little ingenuity and pushing at boundaries can do: we connected up to 16 terminals to a single 1200b/s line and averaged a sub-4 second response time between pressing the send key and start of printing, including a round trip to the server and transaction storage using a 16-bit Control Data mini and 50MB SMD drives.
 

wwenze

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I had to use 64kbps WMA so my 64MB MP3 player could fit 30 songs.

Nowadays with bigger storage I don't really care if it is 10MB or 40MB per song. However, 160MB for 24/96 makes me think again.
 

MRC01

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Back in the 1980s when CDs became commercially available, I had just replaced my TRS-80 with a 4.77 Mhz IBM XT clone (Leading Edge Model D) that had a 20 MB hard drive, which could store about 2 minutes of CD music. Uncompressed, because MP3 or any other kind of compression didn't yet exist. But there was no easy way to get the bits from a music CD to the computer because optical drives for PCs didn't yet exist, neither did any sort of digital output from a CD player (nor digital audio input for a PC).

At that time 176 kB / sec or 10 MB / minute (the approximate rate of CD audio in stereo) was a high data rate. The CPU, storage and I/O of most home computers couldn't handle that. So we didn't use our computers for music. One's music collection was on physical media: LPs, cassettes and CDs.

PS: what happened to MP3? Computers got bigger and faster, but they got more bigger than they got faster. Storage is so cheap it doesn't matter anymore. At high enough bit rates, MP3 was mostly transparent with most music, but even at 320 kbps was never fully transparent with all music. And FLAC became freely and widely available. So there's no longer any reason to sacrifice audio quality to save storage, even if the sacrifice is barely perceptible.
 
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bloodshoteyed

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You YOUNGSTERS! I used 2 300/1200 modems (not at the same time) before getting a 2400.

my first remote connection went through an accoustic coupler / modem, and i'm not even THAT old.....
 

andreasmaaan

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Hah. The good ol' days. I worked at a large (6000+) state agency, and nearly all the employees were using their work PCs to play (and rip, burn, etc ...) music CDs...not to mention fast 'internet access'. The desktop staff got a lot of expertise replacing CD drives that were spinning 8x40hrs per week.

My first access to a CD burner also came c/o a government agency (which my stepfather worked for). We had it at home so he could transfer large databases back and forth between home and the office. I was about 13 at the time and it made me briefly very popular among the other kids. Was about the size of a desktop PC and required the blank disc to be placed inside a caddie. At one-speed, it took 60+ minutes to burn an album, and had about a 1/3 failure rate.
 

ttimer

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Been looking up history that Fraunhofer in 1993 when they launched MP3, It was bit of joke. Like touting 128kbps with bad encoders like blade and more. But 3 MP2 encoders were transparent at 192kbps on more content, So I'm like why didn't they just push MP2 more?. Wikipedia said MUSICAM was pretty much HE MP2 that could sound good <160kbps but was mothballed.

Like others have hinted at, anything over 128kbps wasn't really relevant back then. People with money, hifi enthusiasts and the audio industry which catered to them were mortal enemies of digitally compressed music. That was the domain of youngsters and pirates, who didn't have the storage space to store mid/high bitrate music or the audio gear to care about transparency.
By the time these things changed, mp3 was already firmly entrenched.
 
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