MT9 Audio Format Awesome, Has Dubious Future

There has been some buzz on the interwebs lately about MT9, an audio file format under development by Korean venture company Audizen. MT9 is different from previous file formats because each instrument gets a channel on the audio track. The volumes of these tracks can be adjusted separately, which means that a player taking full advantage of the format would allow the user to remove certain instruments from the track entirely (depending on the quality of the recording). Thus, if you hate the sound of a certain member of a band that is otherwise OK (Chester Bennington comes to mind) , you can just turn that part of the song off. Because this puts power into the hands of the end user, the format has been heralded as revolutionary under the tragically lame commercial title "Music 2.0" (insert diarrhea noise here).

The idea of the format was originally devised by Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a government back Korean think-tank. After preliminary design was completed, Audizen spun off and began working to make the format commercially viable. In April the format was presented to the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), who immediately approved its candidacy to become the next generation digital audio standard.


Personally, I think this audio format is awesome and I would piss myself like an excited chihuahua if it were widely adopted. The problem is that it gives the user's way too much control over the components of the song, which I'm sure makes the record companies extremely uncomfortable. Because a user has access to all the instrument tracks for a song, an MT9 file is basically like a multitrack master recording. Master recordings are typically expensive to obtain and license because they can be used to make remixes of the original songs. Considering how crotchety and dogmatic these companies are, I don't think that they are going to agree to throw away another source of income.



Mp3 became popular without the involvement of the record companies because Mp3's can be ripped from the single track recording that audio CD's, records, and tapes come in. Unlike regular single track audio recordings, you would have to get the record labels to voluntarily convert their master recordings into this format. In theory, people could buy masters, rip them, and put them up on the internet, but I doubt this would catch on. Masters run at least a few grand for a song that is popular in even the loosest sense of the word, and this would make it extremely prohibitive to for the general public to repopulate the collective audio library of the internet.

Though Audizen is trying to develop a way to generate multitrack data from a single track recording, I am hesitant to believe that this will work well on a large scale without a loss of audio quality.