The new mp3PRO format offers significantly improved audio quality over a wide range of bit rates, while remaining completely backwards compatible with standard MPEG-2 Layer-3 Audio (aka "mp3").
Why mp3PRO technology?
Listening to music compressed with mp3 at 128 kbps sounds great. But if you go to lower bit rates the great sound starts lacking the high frequency components. At bit rates of 64 kbps and below the music may begin to sound dull. The reason is that mp3 at these bit rates runs out of bits to compress the music in full audio bandwidth and with significant detail. In this situation the developers of mp3 had to decide whether their codec should produce mp3 music with distortion (so called "coding artifacts") or with limited bandwidth. They opted for limited bandwidth. And as a result, you experience lower bit rate mp3 as band-limited music with just a few distortions. Mp3PRO was created to solve the limitation of limited bandwidth mp3 files.
Winamp Staff about THOMSON mp3PRO Decoder Plugin :
All you need to play mp3PRO files is right here. Decode at any bitrate. Supports ID3 version 2 as well. Good stuff.
Changes in mp3PRO Decoder Plugin 1.2 :
- switched to Nullsoft Install System v2.08
- added SSE optimizations to lower CPU load on PIII and higher
- general complexity reductions
• Note: mp3PRO Decoder Plugin doesn't work with Winamp 3.0!
