MP3 is dead / MP3 is free from patents / Long live MP3

Misleading.

It is more like:

Fraunhofer Institute: "Please stop using MP3 since our patents have expired. We highly recommend you switch to another proprietary format we still get royalties for."
 
WTF. This is a terrible terrible article. MP3 use will probably explode because there is no patent issue anymore meaning more products can incorporate it without having to pay royalties.
 
Somehow I read different content to the article. I thought it said something like, "there is no longer any monetary value for us in the MP3, move to AAC so that we can continue raking in the loot!"
 
Johand said:
MP3 use will probably explode because there is no patent issue anymore meaning more products can incorporate it without having to pay royalties.
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:) Explode? The big companies who wanted to implement it, paid the licenses - where applicable. Those who didn't want to pay, implemented it anyway. I don't think it was hampered too much.
 
The institute did not want to “keep it on life support” as there are better ways to store music – including AAC.
Click to expand...


However, in terms of whether AAC is better than MP3, the advantages of AAC are not entirely decisive, and the MP3 specification, although antiquated, has proven surprisingly robust in spite of considerable flaws. AAC and HE-AAC are better than MP3 at low bit rates (typically less than 128 kilobits per second.)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Yes well who listens to 128k anyway - it is crap.

Like semaphore, flac for me unless unavailable.
 
rwenzori said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Yes well who listens to 128k anyway - it is crap.

Like semaphore, flac for me unless unavailable.
Click to expand...

Everyone. Even you apparently.

FLAC is great but it's still half the size of a .wav file. which is huge.

Plus ,you aren't going to notice the difference between flac and aac if you using the headphones that come with your phone connected to the phones headphone jack.
 
Definitely not a great article. A lot of cars out there have radio headunits that can play MP3, almost all new cars have MP3 playing features.

Why not just use OGG Vorbis?
 
I don't see its use increasing. On the contrary with the increase in bandwidth and storage who wants to compress all the quality out of it.
 
NeoAcheron said:
Definitely not a great article. A lot of cars out there have radio headunits that can play MP3, almost all new cars have MP3 playing features.

Why not just use OGG Vorbis?
Click to expand...

Or Opus? There are many new open source formats with better specs I believe. Problem is prpably if car audio systems support them or not.
 
RIP MP3? Not so fast, this old gal isn't going away yet

You may not have heard of the Fraunhofer Society, but you’ve almost certainly used some of its inventions - notably MP3 (but it also contributed to AAC audio and H.264 video). Recently, many rushed to declare MP3 “dead” because Fraunhofer killed its licensing program and declared AAC the successor.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. Patents on MP3 decoding expired a couple of years ago, you can use any free implementation you wish and not pay a cent in licensing. Recently, patents on encoding expired as well (save for a couple of unimportant ones), so license-free software can create MP3s as well.

How does that lead to the death of the most popular formats around? You may not remember when GIF was patent-encumbered too - Unisis (the patent holder) wanted devs to pay for a license and so devs started building alternative formats. It’s how PNG was born. This threatened the popularity of GIF, there was even a “Burn All GIFs” campaign.

Now that GIF is free of patents, it’s more popular than ever - it’s even supported by keyboards! Not to mention the many image sharing sites that support it (and swap it for “GIFV” because true GIFs waste too much bandwidth).

So, will this be the end of MP3? We doubt it. If at all possible, MP3 will become even more popular. Sure, AAC promises better audio quality, but MP3 encoders have gotten so good that the difference is slim. Plus, there are even better open-source audio codecs out there - like Opus (then there's the FLAC crowd too).

The thing is that MP3 is like JPEG - it’s perceived as old and inefficient, but it’s supported by everything under the sun. That makes it a common medium, so easy to share that it’s not going away anytime soon. This isn’t like cassette tapes or vinyl discs, which became obsolete... wait, those aren’t dead either!

http://www.gsmarena.com/rip_mp3_not_so_fast_this_old_gal_isnt_going_away_yet-news-25021.php
 
Phew, what a relief. Oh wait, I stream 90% of my music now.
#Storm in a teacup.
 
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