Audio Lossless Coding

MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding, also known as MPEG-4 ALS, is an extension to the MPEG-4 audio standard to allow lossless audio compression. The extension was finalized in December 2005.

MPEG-4 ALS is similar to FLAC in its operation. Simply put it is a quantized LPC predictor with a losslessly coded residual using
Golomb Rice Coding or Block Gilbert Moore Coding (BGMC).

Features

* Support for PCM resolutions of up to 32-bit
* Arbitrary sampling rates
* Multi-channel / multi-track support (up to 65536 channels)
* Fast random access to any part of the encoded data.
* Tagging
* Streaming
* Error correction mechanisms
* Can be multiplexed with video data

As of 2006, there has not been wide acceptance of this format, possibly due to the lack of encoders and decoders available. A reference encoder and decoder can be obtained at the MPEG-4 ALS homepage.

History

In July 2002, the Moving Picture Experts Group issued a call for proposals of lossless audio coding procedures to be sent in before December. Seven companies submitted their proposals which were examined taking into consideration compression efficiency, complexity and flexibility. By July 2003, Lossless Predictive Audio Compression (LPAC) was declared as the official draft for the future standard. The reference model was further developed under participation of the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) RealNetworks, and NTT.

See also

* Lossless Predictive Audio Compression (predecessor)
* Lossless Transform Audio Compression (pre-predecessor)
* MPEG-4 SLS (MPEG-4 Scalable to Lossless)

External links

* [http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/projekte/lossless/mp4als.html MPEG-4 ALS homepage]
* [http://www.acnnewswire.net/article.asp?Art_ID=31029&lang= Announcement on ACN Newswire]
* [http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43026 Technical specifications (ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd 2:2006)]