This paper presents a new parallel transmission framework for reliable multimedia data transmission over spectrally shaped channels using multicarrier modulation. We propose to transmit source data layers of different perceptual importance in parallel, each occupying a number of subchannels. New loading algorithms are developed to efficiently allocate the available resources, e.g., transmitted power and bit rate, to the subchannels according to the source layers they transmit. Instead of making the bit error rate of all the subchannels equal as in most existing loading algorithms, the proposed algorithm assigns different error performance to the subchannels to achieve unequal error protection for different layers. The channel induced distortion in mean-square sense is minimized. We show that the proposed system can be applied nicely to both fixed length coding and variable-length coding. Asymptotic gains with respect to channel distortion are also derived. Numerical examples show that the proposed algorithm achieves significant performance improvement compared to the existing work, especially for spectrally shaped channels commonly used in in ADSL systems.