Lasse Penttinen
18 May 2002 14:48
Emedialive has published and interesting article about using the DVD format as a storage space form compressed audio. They see great demand and use for such audio format, but also bring up the point that none of the current DVD players are up for the task. If a DVD is inserted, the players assume it’s a video disc even though they might support MP3s on CD-Rs or CD-RWs.
It’s true that MP3 DVDs would make gigantic jukebox audio sources. On the other hand, I really see no point in damaging the audio quality with lossy compression (such as MP3) when there is such a large capacity available. In my opinion the way to go could be lossless compression, which could squeeze the music roughly 30-50% without affecting the quality. But there are no global standards is lossless compression. Instead there are many independent software titles available, like Monkey’s Audio or WavPack.
Also, I have to correct one thing about this article:
One compressed CD-R/RW disc holds as much as 20 ordinary CDs and can transform a single, compact, and only slightly modified player into the equivalent of a multi-disc changer.
Currently 1:20 compression is definitely not possible in Hi-Fi quality. Using high quality MP3s one can achieve compression around 1:8 and other formats like MusePack or OGG aren’t much different.
Emedialive