I dare say that this insistence on backward compatibility is going to kill this format.
If anyone still remembers, many years ago Thomson released the mp3PRO format.
It was a low bitrate MP3 with some added spectral band data that could recreate the original
music sound quality. So in theory, you could have the same quality for half the bitrate/size.
To my decaying ears, it sounded really good at the time... if played on the supported players.
But when you played these files in any unsupported player, which happened to be all of them
except for the Thomson's Player or the Thomson's Winamp Plugin, you ended up listening to
a HORRIBLE low bitrate sound quality, since the extra mp3PRO information was ignored.
And even worse: you had no way of telling if a file being downloaded was an original mp3 file
or a new mp3PRO file, since they both used the same file extension. Maybe if they had renamed
the extension to .mp3pro or something like that, the mp3PRO format might have had some chance...
Years pass... and now they are doing the same thing again.
Instead of focusing on a lossless mp3 codec for a specific kind of market/enthusiast, they are
insisting in keeping backward compatibility with players using the same method as mp3PRO did.
And once more the files are going to have the same extension as the original ones, instead
of .mp3hd or something similar.
I hope I am wrong, but this surely spells doom to me.