mp3HD Wants to Breed FLAC and MP3 Together

French magnate Thomson is positing a new type of a mp3 file the mp3HD is basically a standard MP3 with higher quality version of the same track along for the ride. Thomson hopes that this new format's scalable quality will endear itself to audiophiles who don't want to ditch their old (or new) MP3 players. This would allow for portability amongst systems with differing capabilities. Most MP3 players will see them as nothing more than regular MP3s but if you've equipped your PC with the appropriate codecs you'll be able to access the Higher quality audio stream. The new codec is compressed slightly more aggressively than FLAC but is still capturing 800kbps of sound data. The wrapper MP3 data can be scaled at any quality level but since the HD data is going to be piggybacked on regardless there's not much since trying to economize for size.

While definitely having some niche utility there's not too much to get excited about since this tries to cater to 2 groups that very seldom overlap, audiophiles and music pack-rats. The songs will take 6 times longer to download and take up 6 times the storage on your already cramped flash players. Similar add-ons have been attaching themselves to mp3s like leeches almost since their first release. ID3, ID3v2, Album Art, Lyrics, etc... There's no reason that sticking a higher fidelity version of the song into that melange wouldn't be a win, eventually. Now while it also would be nice to only manage one library of music this format is a little ahead of its time. After another few cycles of Moore's Law elapses this will have great use but it will truly rely on bandwidth and flash storage no longer being a factor.