Fraunhofer, the company that made digital music catch on thanks to the ubiquitous mp3 format, has just released a high definition format, HD-AAC.  The idea is that this would encode music in both a lossless high res format, and the current lossy standard.  It would play on devices and in software that could decode the new HD-AAC format in HD mode, and it would play on the rest of the devices out there as a normal AAC file (for those keeping score, AAC is the format used by iTunes).

It’s a nice idea.  We music producers like to record music at the highest resolution possible.  We’d love it if there was an HD codec that really caught on.  But will this one catch on?  Fraunhofer hopes so, as they will make more money off encoder sales!  But there are a lot of free encoders for existing formats, and HD-AAC is not surround, which would seem to make it even more valuable for movies.

It would be nice if some form of high resolution compressed music would take off, but we’ll see.  Consumers seem to think that the current compression is good enough, so there’s not a lot of pressure to improve…