A new digital-music format is spreading on the Net that enthusiasts say is more compact and clearer than MP3, but it may be too late in the game to matter.
Called VQF, the compression technology creates files that are approximately 30 percent smaller than the benchmark MP3 format, and its proponents claim the sound is noticeably better, especially in the treble range.
The file-size difference between MP3 and VQF can mean minutes or hours, depending on how fast a user's connection is to the Net. VQF files are compressed at a 1 to 18 ratio, while MP3 is at 1 to 11. So converting the same 50MB .wav file would create a 4.55MB MP3 file, or a 2.78MB VQF file. Furthermore, fans say VQF guarantees a high-quality file every time, whereas MP3 encoders have a greater variance in quality.
The VQF format, officially named TwinVQ, was developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone several years ago. NTT licenses the technology to Yahama for the SoundVQ player and the SolidAudio portable player.
In the same way that MP3 has spread over the last few years, software developers and audiophiles have been hacking up VQF sites. They've created a number of players, encoders, skins, and other software utilities. There is even a plug-in for the Winamp player that supports VQF files.
Christophe Thibault, a 23-year-old Parisian, built the K-Jofol player last year with VQF in mind, but said it has been difficult to hack out legal software that uses the format.
"The main advantage of the VQF format is probably its sound quality, but it has really more disadvantages than advantages.... The biggest disadvantage is its proprietary format and that Yamaha doesn't allow anyone to access its files," he said.
So is VQF set to supplant MP3 in the online music world?
"Not likely. It seems like a Betamax kind of situation. It has higher quality, but its timing was poor," said Joe Koeniger, a computer-engineering student at Virginia Tech and webmaster of VQF.com. "MP3 caught the spotlight early on and got most of the attention, development, etcetera. But for people serious about audio encoding and audio quality, it is superior. I still use MP3 frequently. They coexist nicely since there are players that play both MP3 and VQF seamlessly."
