Rockbites: Liquid Audio technology to allow CDs via Internet

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October 2000 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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Liquid Audio technology to allow CDs via Internet
23 October 2000

Good news for those of us to whom MP3s sound about as pleasant as forks scraping across fine china: new technology from Liquid Audio, Inc. in Redwood City, California will speed downloading of full CD quality music in the near future. The same technology will allow just-in-time recording of full quality CD-Rs at retailers from music streamed over the Internet—think custom CDs, previously unreleased tracks, and out of print records, all on demand. And it will allow studios to transfer master quality files quickly, easing collaboration among far-flung musicians.
    The United States awarded four patents last month to Liquid Audio’s 'master quality lossless compression' technology. Unlike MP3 (MPEG I, layer 3), Windows Media, a2b, and similar formats, the new Liquid Audio compression does not degrade audio at all. The price for perfect quality is larger file sizes. Processed files are about 50% of the original size, compared to just 10-20% for MP3 files.
    On music, the new compression is much better than traditional lossless compression formats such as PKZip or Stuffit, whose processed files are about 90% of the original size—hardly worth it.
    Like MP3 files, however, master quality Liquid Audio files can be decompressed by personal computers without special hardware and in real-time: while you are playing them back.
    Liquid Audio has not announced a timeframe for first implementation of the new compression scheme, but you can expect to see it first in record store kiosks that let you create custom CDs. | Liquid Audio | | top of page |

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