Looking at mp3HD, the “Lossless” MP3 Format Nobody Ever Used.

Looking at mp3HD, the “Lossless” MP3 Format Nobody Ever Used.

I came across the Wikipedia article for mp3HD again and tried to clean it up somewhat.

In doing it, I actually looked at what a horrible format this was. As another harebrained scheme to “extend” MP3 and keep extracting royalties on it somehow, Thomson (Technicolor) (Now bankrupt.) and Fraunhofer Society (amusingly, my spell correct wanted to call them the Fraudster Society) collaborated to create a “lossless MP3 file” format about a decade after FLAC and WavPack already existed.

FLAC is proposed as an IETF standard as of 2019, but whether it becomes one or not, even Microsoft and Apple support them, which means it’s not only mainstream, but it supplanted their attempts at a proprietary lossless audio codec too. (Windows Media Audio Lossless and Apple Lossless).

In the end, Apple gave up and made Apple Lossless open source, after it had been reverse engineered anyway. Apple Lossless takes 400% more CPU time to decode than FLAC, compresses the files less, and has no official way to do error checking.

Although I suppose you could hack it in by running md5sum on each file, then adding it as a comment on the tags. It still wouldn’t be as good as FLAC or Wavpack’s because you couldn’t just ask the playback software to check and compare, and you’d need to store two values. One for the source file and one for the ALAC file (to make sure you could verify the source if you were to unpack it later).

Windows Media Audio Lossless has even more problems. I’ve actually only encountered that one once and ended up reading the data out into WavPack with the help of FFMpeg. I did a checksum verification on both ends and they matched. Then I never looked at WMAL again.

But mp3HD was a terrible codec. I’ve never actually used it, but I have read the specification. I think I played around with the encoder once to see if it could easily make standard MP3 files like the “MP3 Surround” encoder could, but they took that feature out.

The marketing tagline was “It’s time to preserve your music forever.”, and apparently “forever” was the two years it took Thomson/Technicolor and their Patent Troll Pals at FhG to give up on the format, forever.

mp3HD took advantage of the fact that you “can” shove up to 256 MB of arbitrary data into an ID3v2 tag, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. They also claimed that the part of the file that was a lossy MP3 would play on anything that supported regular MP3 files. Which was a lie.

Why was shoving arbitrary data into an ID3 file a bad idea?

Well, tagging software.

If the user edited the actual comments in the tag, or the tag itself, the lossless data could become corrupt or lost entirely since MP3 with a tag is essentially two files in one.

The tag piggybacks the end or the front of the file (depending on the version) in an otherwise empty frame or series of frames.

So the mp3HD codec simply packed non-MP3 data into empty MP3 frames of an arbitrary length misusing a possible field in the ID3 tag (not to exceed the 256 MB tag size limit).

The actual MP3 part of the file was now just a standard MP3 using whatever encoding settings the person who made the “mp3HD” file selected.

So there was a huge potential for data loss. Edit the wrong field or accidentally rewrite the tag, bye bye lossless data correction.

Further, since this is undefined behavior by the ID3 specification (the closest thing to data you are supposed to put into one, officially, is album art), player software is free to interpret the data in the tag pretty much however it wants to. It’s not standard MP3 data, so it won’t play audio, but what it did do, in mplayer at least, was play the lossy MP3 followed by an additional 40 minutes of silence, according to a person on Hydrogen Audio.

The 256 MB limit in the ID3 tag means that your limit for the file is roughly 38 minutes in CD quality (16/44.1), which immediately means no “one huge file with .cue” like you can do with WavPack and FLAC. It also was limited to 16-bit / 48 kHz source, like MP3 was, so no native ability to directly deal with “High Res” sources. Also, if you used 16/48 then your time limit per file would probably drop to half an hour.

(Coincidentally, 38 minutes is the amount of time a Stargate can be connected without a ZPM plugged in, or a black hole on the other side, or the overload weapon used by Anubis, or a planet full of Naquadah melting down around it.)

So given the potential for data loss (due to the abuse of the ID3 tag), the larger size than FLAC or WavPack, the inability to use Hybrid Lossless (like WavPack’s lossy .wv with a lossless correction .wvc in the same folder) meant that you couldn’t break them apart and just put the lossy section on your portable device, there’s already no point in even trying to use something like this.

The fact that most devices only played MP3 in standard quality meant you’d waste at least three times the storage space vs. the quality of playback you received.

When you could have just put a FLAC file on the device and listened to it in lossless in exchange for all the space it uses.

That’s also if the thing even worked at all and didn’t attempt to read the non-MP3 data in the tag and play 40 minutes of static per file between every track.

Looking at this format, it’s hard to even think how they thought this would work or what tortured mind this even came out of. But we can be glad that it didn’t succeed.

As usual, proprietary software companies and patent trolls like to come to the party a decade late and re-implement something that already exists, badly.

My father used to work for RCA as an electrical engineer.

After GE purchased the company, it really went to Hell. No longer were they an innovative company that at least stood a chance against the Japanese.

GE sold the RCA consumer electronics division to the French (Thomson/Technicolor) who did not take good care of it. They ceded a decade of potential innovation (the 90s) to the Japanese, outsourced product manufacturing to Mexico, hired my dad back as a contractor who lived in Mexico at more than his previous salary had been, and then finally fired the Mexicans and sold the “brands” to the Chinese.

After this, they became a patent troll that was living large on MP3 royalties, and after the patents expired in the US they were sunk, and declared bankruptcy in France, followed by Chapter 15 Bankruptcy in the United States. I think all that’s left of them now is some motion picture stuff.

It’s just simply unbelievable how incompetent the French were with RCA. They destroyed an American icon and managed to blow up the French company a little later on.

Going back to MP3, the standard didn’t actually specify DRM.

Actually, it didn’t even specify a tagging format, so the only official use of the ID3 tag from Thomson/Technicolor and FhG was to violate the specification with mp3HD.

(You can also use APEv2 tags in an MP3.)

There were “potential helpers” for some DRM to be added to MP3s later, like the Copyright Bit (which pirated ones always said “No”, of course) and the people who did the ID3 specification left a comment field to indicate what DRM scheme was in use.

But by the time anyone may have wanted to add this, Microsoft and Apple already had their preferred formats anyway and they came with DRM. Apple extended MPEG-4 Audio (AAC) with a digital restrictions scheme called “FairPlay” and Microsoft had one for Windows Media Audio (WMA) called “Janus”.

Since I despise DRM, I always called them FoulPlay and Anus DRM when I was talking about them. In my last post, I mentioned my reaction to the iTunes Store in 2004, and it was to delete it immediately and refuse to ever touch it again.

Apparently, “FairPlay” means you allegedly bought something but when you try to play it in your preferred software it doesn’t work, then you find out you have to buy an iPod and “manage your licenses” with iTunes, and that’s totally not something I was ever interested in doing.

The MP3 format, for all its many technical and legal flaws, nobody ever bothered to restrict it like this.

You can still purchase them at Amazon without DRM and there’s none of this “FoulPlay and Anus” stuff controlling what you do and eventually taking the file back from you without a refund.

But Amazon is not your pal. Their Kindle Store works exactly like “FoulPlay and Anus”, and the Free Software Foundation took to calling it the Amazon “Swindle”.

Facebook is dying. Part II.

In my last post, I mentioned that Social (Control) Media is dying off, and we’re no worse for wear because of it.

I noted that Musk was ruining Twitter (as a business) and clearly had no idea what to do, because he has no successful businesses on their own merit, which make profit without ripping off the public via government theft of wages. (Taxation to give to private companies as endless bailouts.)

Musk is hardly alone. Many of the large US corporations operate this way.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone totally crazy. Like Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine crazy.

He’s thrown so much money into the “Metaverse” VR crap, which everyone mocks, and most people who actually did buy the expensive headsets gave up trying to use within their first month, that he’s wiped out over $268 billion of wealth and climbing just with this, and only with the top 10 investors in Facebook.

Most of the loss goes to Zuckerberg, but in many cases, Facebook shares were stuffed into people’s retirement accounts like some sort of a Ponzi scheme, without their consent, because it was part of a passive fund.

(Most American workers have no control over their retirement investments, either because a pension fund “takes care of that” or because they’re in some sort of corporate savings schemes like 401(k) and 403(b), where they have to choose between funds, and they all have some shit in the plumbing so there is no perfect outcome.)

Facebook is failed. It has plunged in “book value” by over $700 billion in the past year. It just sacked 11,000 people today in “Round 1” (means more to come….), and it admits it will lose many more billions of dollars in “Metaverse” before Mark Zuckerberg runs the company into the ground completely.

Any one problem that Facebook has would be bad for the company, but probably not fatal.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve seen ad revenues decline as America enters quite possibly a worse recession than 2008, and their CEO has not only failed to see the recession coming, but blew through their cash reserves instead of investing it into the products people are actually “engaging” with. They have some, but they’re being utterly neglected due to the VR nonsense.

Zuckerberg takes advantage of the somewhat unique structure of Facebook to do whatever he wants with it (he set it up so he gets a lot of votes) and his investors only have two options. Sit there and continue to get thumped by a CEO who is squandering assets, or dump their shares for whatever they can get today, which floods the market with shares that nobody wants at lower and lower prices.

I do wish the people who are losing their jobs the best of luck in the 2023 Hunger Games.

Maybe some of them can even find a job that _benefits_ society next time instead of pampering my parents, both of which are right-wing cranks who are level 12 susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda, with a feedback bubble which makes them feel validated, or like they’re in some sort of clear majority in their political opinions, which get even more fringe by the year thanks to this gaslighting.

If my parents were a lot more astute than they actually are, they would notice that it was Jack Welch (GE/RCA merger, dad) and the Catholic Church (mom) who screwed them on their retirement and left them to rot, and Republicans that allowed it and are coming for their Social Security money while they worry about non-existent threats like “brown people from other countries”, like the Fox News telescreens order them to.

In his case, he got his from a wealthy Republican businessman, and in her case, the pension turned out to be nothing more than an unsecured promissory note from a Mafia-affiliated group of pedophiles with a city-state in the middle of Italy. Will they never learn?

(Rhetorical. People who haven’t figured it out by 71 or 65 probably won’t. Mom still swears up and down that the Archdiocese told them their pensions were guaranteed for 20 years. Just like they were previously guaranteed for “as long as you live”, and before that they were “guaranteed to grow until you’re 66”, then “63”, then “62”, then “nobody new gets a pension and yours is frozen NOW”. How much money is there really? Nobody will say. Where is it invested? “Don’t worry!”)

Even if the unemployed Facebook and Twitter workers take a job at Taco Bell, slinging cheap tacos and burritos at people who are stoned at 2 AM is neutral to the fabric of our society.

Facebook and Twitter are as corrosive as Xenomorph blood and I wish the platform a swift and total demise. But they’ve already done insurmountable harm to people like my parents.

Mom spent all of COVID bashing me for being responsible and levelheaded enough to get me and my spouse our vaccines. For wearing masks at large gatherings. For using hand hygiene. And we didn’t get COVID, and they got….COVID and the flu at her house, at the same time.

She lacks the ability to comprehend how vaccines work, or even the very basics of germ theory, which is unfortunate since she’s a nurse.

Many political confederates of mom and dad are no longer with us because listening to the Party of Trump was the last mistake they ever made.

But even as they witnessed millions of each other dying on ventilators, they still proclaim it was all a hoax.

This is what happens when you’re watching Fox News and looking at Facebook all day.

Facebook waited until this country was on the verge of being overthrown in a coup before they even thought to ban Trump. It took _days_ after for them to claim they made a very brave decision.

In the background, they didn’t want to do it. They wanted dimwits looking at Facebook, even if Trump was the reason why. It helped them sell ads.

Facebook is too dangerous to continue. Fortunately, I doubt we will need to endure it for too much longer.