new mutlichannel mp2 encoder by tooLame author

[DSPguru]

Mike Cheng have just told me he will be working on a multichannel version of toolame (mctooLAME).
check it out :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mctoolame/

currently, it's pretty alpha-ish, but it will encode a standard 5channel AIFF to 5channel mpeg audio at 192kbps.

[tiki4]

Nice news, on the other hand, what's the use for it right now?

1. One can use multichannel MPEG audio for SVCDs but only very, very few DVD players play that SVCDs as multichannel (presumably Philips), the rest just sees plain stereo.

2. To my knowledge there is absolutely no way to play such a disc on a PC as there seems to be no DirectShow filter that decodes MC but again only stereo. Even Winamp with MAD plugin does not see 5 channels.

3. My conclusion: if there is some use for that encoder, Mike Cheng should also provide a decoder (maybe help the MAD people or better: write a DS filter).

4. The above isn't meant rude in any way, but I can't see the purpose.

5. Anyway thanks to Mike Cheng for maintaining one of the best MP2 encoders around.


Regards,

tiki4

[Corby]

Tiki4, there IS a decoder on Mike Cheng's homepage. Someone could use it to turn it into DS filter, Foobar component or even plugin for the Player Formerly Known As Winamp. :devil: And I'm sure DSPGuru will support the encoder in future BeSweet releases.

If there were any stable encoding and decoding tools you would see much better MPEG Multichannel support in players. The point is we still don't have really good alternative for AC3, and MPEG MC could be that alternative.

[tiki4]

Thanks Corby.

Well, there still remains the problem that you usually don't watch your SVCDs on PC, aren't you? I think there will never be a wide spread support for MC MPEG audio for SVCDs in standalone DVD players. Maybe Philips has that and a few others, but they defined the SVCD standard. On PC there doesn't seem to much of a problem anymore to have AC3 playback, so what keeps you from keeping the original soundtrack?

Don't get me wrong here, I'd like to see a DS filter or a dedicated SVCD player for PC some day. Actually it drives me nuts not to be able to watch SVCD subtitles with any Windows DVD software player (I never tried that with Linux players so far, sorry). But this would all be fun to me, nothing more.

When it comes to audio only: Maybe there is some potential. It still needs to get a real multichannel format that can outperform AC3. I think AAC MC is that format, but the lack of free encoders... (AACenc stopped at 2.15, all new version are part of Nero and you have to pay for that, what I don't like to do). My hopes were in Ogg Vorbis first, but for the moment they won't implement better channel coupling, so this is also a dead end. And now MPEG audio? Do you think it can get superior to AC3? I don't know, I'm not sure.

tiki4

[Corby]

Well, I never liked AC3 even if I kept it in most of my xvid encodes. There's still much trouble in for example splitting an AVI with AC3 inside and I always have a feeling that something can go wrong any moment during playback, like sound going out of sync. Not that this ever happened, I'm just not comfortable with it.

Other thing is that AC3 isn't the best choice regarding sound quality. Of course, we couldn't do really better than original when transcoding, but maybe we could do it in much lower bitrate. That's why I'm looking for MPEG Multichannel. Mike Cheng is the guy who took the shitty-sounding dist10 mp3 encoder (I had some MP3s back from 97 encoded with dist10, since l3enc had serious flaws regarding JS and you couldn't turn it off, and dist10 was the only alternative) and made a lame out of it. There's a possibility that he could do the same with multichannel.

As you said, we're in dead-end regarding open and free multichannel audio. AAC is closed as it can be, and although I don't doubt Ahead (it's Ahead that hired Ivan, aacenc developer, not Winamp) will make a great commercial solution, but that's not what we need. It seems that Ogg won't properly support mc in near future neither, so it may be that mctoolame is our only hope for free and open mc audio. Probably the most interesting thing would be to take Layer 3 and put it in MPEG2 Multichannel container - if I understood MPEG specifications correctly this is theoretically possible. Think mcLame. But, I doubt that lame developers are interesting in supporting multichannel mp3.

[tiki4]

[Sorry, edited that Winamp out. Of course Ivan was hired by Ahead.]

What I don't understand from your previous post is, why is AAC more closed than for example MP2/3? It's part of the MPEG formats and there are quite many holding patents on that stuff (this should be true for any kind of MPEG video/audio).

To give you my point of view: I hope for Matroska and that they manage to fit Musepack into that new container. SV8 is on its way and there were rumours that MPC will get open source one day. Also Frank Klemm is working in multichannel, maybe not for the very near future, but I think it will be realised some day. Anyway, the only chance for getting much lower bitrate than with AC3 is possibily Vorbis (but when?) or something like AAC plus which will become part of the MPEG4 standard in the near future. MPC sound great but won't give you lower bitrates I guess and as it is related to layer 2 I think mctoolame will suffer from the same problem (or do I get that wrong here?). I hope Mike Cheng will prove me wrong.

Regards,

tiki4

[Corby]

Well, what I wanted to say is that we cannot count on high quality open source AAC encoders, while we do have lame and toolame/mctoolame for MP3/2. Also, it seems that patent holders won't bother much with MP2/3, but with AAC that may be not the case. But, time may prove me wrong, we'll see...

I didn't know that Frank is working on multichannel support in MPC, that could also be very interesting, even if that could not get us lower bitrates. BTW, rumours about open-source MPC are probably true, considering that there is an future official Musepack site in the works at corecodec.rog calling MPC as "open-source audio codec".

[tiki4]

Take a look here (http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/mpc/INFO), regarding multichannel.

[frank]

I'm waiting for the multi-channel mp2 option in BeSweet. Then we don't need the Philips tool pub_enc anymore.

But,
for good multi-channel sound (5.1) we need bitrates >= 320 kbps.
192 kbps for 5.1 multi-channel?? :( :( too less quality.
Then I prefer DPL 2.

[tiki4]

Agreed.