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Coding Technologies MP3pro player/encoder

MP3pro Audio Player MP3pro was a nice new addition to the MP3 format. It allows 64kbps files to have similar quality to files in the 96kbps-128kbps range.

What enabled this small miracle is a technology called SBR (Spectral Band Replication) developed by Coding Technologies. It regenerates the high frequency components normally lost when compressing music to such low bitrates.

Unfortunately the addition of SBR to MP3 was never standardized. For this reason, there are few players supporting it and fewer encoders - basically, only players and encoders based on official libraries from FhG / Thomson / CodingTechnologies. Particularly, no open source implementations of encoders or decoders exist, hampering adoption of MP3pro in any operating system other than Windows (the MP3pro files are compatible with all compliant MP3 decoders, but without the SBR part, greatly decreasing the audio quality).

SBR was later added to the AAC standard with the HE-AAC name.

A mirror of the official MP3pro page can be visited at the Internet Archive.

The application available here for download is the Coding Technologies MP3pro demo. It can play MP3pro in all available bitrates, but encodes only to 64kbps. There is also a playback plugin for XMMS.


Date: 2002-08-08
Version: 1.1.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mp3ProAudioPlayer11.exe - 1.127kB

Date: 2001-06-20
Version: 1.0.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mp3ProAudioPlayer.exe - 1.111kB

Date: 2005-09-14
Version: 1.0.1
Interface: XMMS plugin
Platform: Linux
Download: libmp3PRO-1.0.1-1.i386.rpm - 159kB


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