Everything's going HD these days. TV, radio, even cosmetics. Now the lowly MP3 file has gone HD. MP3HD is a new format developed by Thomson, the folks who helped develop the original MP3 format. MP3HD uses lossless data compression, meaning there's no loss in sound quality. Like other lossless formats, the files produced are fairly large, but still smaller than a WAV file. As storage increases in size and decreases in price, squishing the life out of your music library just isn't necessary. Is it?

What's quite interesting is that MP3HD is backward-compatible. A single file will actually contain two versions of your song the lossless version that will play on new MP3HD-compatible players, and a regular MP3 file to play on a regular player.

Now, this kind of defeats the purpose of MP3 in the first place. The files created are bigger than other lossless formats because it also includes the standard version. However, the purist in me is just thrilled that a lossless format, which maintains the original sound quality, is being developed with a name that people just might embrace. But are you willing to re-encode your whole library to improve the quality? You can check out the encoder here.

MP3HD, via Ars Technica