MWC Audio Encoding News Roundup; Skype cracked!

OK, let’s see what novelties and new announcements MWC had for us, music / radio streaming buffs. You may already know I’m pretty much into audio encoding; see for example my HE-AAC v2-related remarks in my Radio Stream Transcoding Bible.

Fraunhofer Society

The, for the MP3 format, well-known Fraunhofer Society demoed HD-AAC, their latest-and-greatest losless format, which is compatible with any AAC-LC players; that is, even old(er) iPod’s (and, of course, Pocket PC’s with an AAC-LC-compliant player). The new format has been announced (and, first, was demoed) this year at CES.

While some people predict (see for example THIS) the new format will quickly die or won’t be implemented by anyone (like the fate of MP3 Pro), I think the new format has a lot of potential. After all,

1. a LOT of Windows Mobile (or, for that matter, generic mobile - for example, Symbian or iPhone) users listen to other kinds of losless music (most importantly, FLAC). That is, a full implementation for Windows Mobile (Symbian, mobile incarnations of Linux, Blackberry etc.) can make a lot of people switch to the new format from, say, using FLAC.

2. it is fully (!!!) backwards compatible with 128 kbps AAC-LC – that is, the native format of iPods, iTunes etc. This means a HD-AAC tune can be played back on any AAC-LC player – without the quality enhancements, of course. But, at least, you won’t encounter any quality problem. Unlike with, say, only HE-AAC- but not HE-AAC v2-compliant players playing back HE-AAC v2 contents, resulting in severely reduced audio quality and mono sound. The only problem you’ll face with playing back HD-AAC clips on a mobile device are the (in cases, far) bigger storage requirements. However, the fact that you can use exactly the same sound file on your desktop and (even simple, old) mobiles for playback can be a lifesaver in many cases. That is, you don’t need to create a separate FLAC and a separate AAC-LC version of your CD if you prefer having the original in as good quality as possible, without using any lossy codec. Again, it’s only the differece in the file size that may cause you problems on a memory-constrained mobile device (and, probably, the higher CPU / power usage – I’m not sure about this.)

The new format is based on the MPEG-4 SLS (Scalable to Lossless) standard.

Also see for example THIS (in addition to the above-linked Wiki pages) for more info.

SRS (Sound Retrieval System)

The SRS Labs folks also demoed their SRS.

I’ve asked them if it was also SRS that Nokia used in the N95 (you may remember that in my SRS vs. N95 vs. Conduits Pocket Player test, I’ve found the N95 to have by far the best stereo widening effect via stereo speakers and SRS definitely lagged behind; this, of course, has nothing to do with the quality enhancement through headphones); it isn’t.

Dolby

The Dolby folks have come out with an audio “surround” enhancer like SRS WOW HD. It works pretty nicely via stereo headphones (don’t, however, except true surround effects with standard headphones – the sound is still two-dimensional, despite what the Dolby folks state). They’re speaking to mobile device manufacturers (WinMo included) on delivering their technology. Currently, nothing is certain.

They ran some of their preprocessed audio + video demos on some Nokia N95 8GB’s. Preprocessed, of course, means that they haven’t implemented the client for Symbian (the operating system that the N95 is based on) - or, for that matter, any mobile operating system -, just on desktop Windows.

In addition to the surround / SRS-alike enhancer, they have also showcased their traditional HE-AAC v2-related stuff. For an end user, there isn’t much to write home about that, though: after all, there’re numerous other encoders (even free ones coming with, say, WinAMP – see tutorial HERE) and players on Windows Mobile (and on some other platforms like Symbian and, in the near future, Blackberry – see the announcement of nuTsie) to play it back.

VoiceAge’s AMR-WB+ demo

In addition to Fraunhofer’s HD AAC and Dolby’s demo, it was definitely VoiceAge’s Adaptive Multi Rate – WideBand plus (AMR-WB+) demo that interested me the most because of the excellent low-bitrate voice quality.

While music reproduction isn’t as good as that of HE-AAC v2 at 24…32 kbps (a bit reluctantly, the VoiceAge guys have also admitted this after my thoroughly testing the quality of their music demos; before that, they stated it’s at least as good as HE-AAC v2 for music at 24...32 kbps), voice reproduction at very low bitrates was indeed definitely better. I’ve listened to a 8 (eight) kbps stream of an audio book and just loved the results. While, from time to time, the voice sounded pretty synthetic, it was still way better than the results of any other technology at the same bitrate. Based on the amount & quality of treble, it was clear the technology delivered the standard 16 kHz sampling rate and, except for some kind of a “synthetic” effect, common with low-speed vocoders like that of GSM, the voice quality was astonishingly good – as opposed to the 8 kHz of the 5 kbps AMR.

(the demo equipment)

(the GUI of the voice demo app)

VoiceAge isn’t a client developer; that is, it’s not them that will release AMR-WB+ to the available mobile platforms. The technology is a 3GPP one and will, therefore, hopefully enjoy a more widespread implementation than with a proprietary technology; the VoiceAge folks stated it’ll be Sony-Ericsson first to come out with it built-in into their phones in 2009. Other device manufacturers to implement it are unknown at present. That is, right now, don’t expect any AMR-WB players – at least officially, from the phone OEM’s.

Also see the official homepage for more info.

Finally, some Skype news. I know it isn’t directly audio encoding-related, but you still may be interested in this, particularly if you consider Skype probably the only “safe” and “not breakable” – as has also been pointed out by the official Wiki page.

Skype "cracked"

According to popular belief, Skype isn’t crackable. Therefore, a lot of people prefer it to, say, MSN Messenger, which is known for not being safe. Now, this isn’t more the case: with P3 Solutions GmbH’s solution (deployable by state police agencies – like they already do in Germany) Skype speech (but NOT textual chatting!) is interceptible.

Interestingly, their solution isn’t listed on their homepage and entering “Skype” into their search engine doesn’t result in any result either; only the old version of the page in the Google cache shows they indeed demoed this. (“P3 displays its wide portfolio of security services: PLMN threat analysis, GSM network penetration testing, code inspection as well as lawful interception. There will be a live demonstration of our source interception solution using popular services like SKYPE.”) A Google search for “skype lawful interception” doesn’t result in any usable result. However, they indeed had a flier on this as can be seen in the following crop of the above (sorry, I can’t find the original flier now – if anyone is interested, I can try to dig it out of my ~20 kg fliers and press stuff):

UPDATE (later the same day): I've found the P3 Skype crack flier. They're as follows:


(Photos taken by a Nokia N95-1; the high-resolution version recompressed with quality=70).