MP3 Surround is an extension of

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

for multi-channel audio support including

5.1 surround sound 5.1 surround sound ("five-point one") is the common name for surround sound audio systems. 5.1 is the most commonly used layout in home theatres. It uses five full bandwidth channels and one low-frequency effects channel (the "point one"). Dolb ...

. It was developed by Fraunhofer IIS in collaboration with Thomson and

Agere Systems Agere Systems, Inc. was an integrated circuit components company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Spun out of Lucent Technologies in 2002, Agere was merged into LSI Corporation in 2007. LSI was in turn acquired by Avago Technologies in 2014. In ...

, and released in December 2004.mp3 SURROUND Set for Launch - Fraunhofer IIS, Thomson, and Agere Systems Unveil - Free mp3 SURROUND Evaluation Download
/ref>Hear all about it: MP3 goes surround-sound
/ref> MP3 Surround is backward compatible with standard MP3.mp3 Surround
The data overhead is 16 kbit/s, which allows for file sizes similar to standard stereo MP3 files. The file size is approximately 10% larger than that of a typical MP3 file. The current evaluation encoder is licensed for personal and non-commercial uses. An MP3 Surround file can be created from 5 or 6 channels of WAV audio. Several companies, such as DivX, Inc. and Magix, have announced support for the new codec. DivX, Inc. released their first player with MP3 Surround support on September 6, 2006. In January 2006, Thomson and Fraunhofer IIS also released two new companion technologies: Ensonido, which allows playback of MP3 Surround 5.1 channel sound through stereo headphones, and MP3 SX, which upgrades standard stereo mp3 file to mp3 surround files. On its 5.5 release, Nullsoft

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...

has included the MP3 Surround format as a part of its integrated MPEG audio decoder (released October 10, 2007). As of 2 July 2008, with

system software System software is software designed to provide a platform for other software. Examples of system software include operating systems (OS) like macOS, Linux, Android and Microsoft Windows, computational science software, game engines, search engin ...

v2.40,

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

supports MP3 Surround playback.

References

External links

Thomson Releases MP3 Surround
{{Sound-tech-stub Audio codecs Digital audio MP3 Surround sound