Slashdot Mirror
'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary
Sachin Garg writes "The Data Compression News Blog
reports that on July 14th 2005, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary.
On this day back in 1995, the researchers at
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated
Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new
audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987, in 1992
it was considered far ahead of its times, then MP3 became the generally accepted
acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3" and no other coding
method so far (2005) could uncrown MP3 as the popular standard for digital music on the
computer and on the Internet."
That is the perception, at least, on the internet. Music files will probably be "MP3" for a long time, just like Pepsi is often referred to generically as a "Coke." iTunes Music Store, for example, uses .m4a and .m4p (their AAC format) file extensions. Considering that iTunes Music Store sells so many of these files (hundreds of millions), and that iTunes (a popular cross-platform music player) rips by default to .m4a, and that .mp3 is clearly behind the curve of audio compression technology, the time may be coming soon when .mp3 is king in name only.
I believe the apologies should really go to Frank Sinatra or Ervin M. Drake...
(But the version from the Simpsons was wonderful, too.)
There's nothing reasonable about any software patent. Also, the terms they list on their licensing page are the terms for now; there's nothing that compels the patent holder to license any particular person or organization for any particular use of the patented ideas. The patent holder can deny you a patent license just because they want to.
/.ers in other threads) would look to other formats, lossless formats if their storage space was large enough, better lossy encoders otherwise. For years now, far more capable portable digital audio players play Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. If I were compressing human speech and I wanted to save a lot of space, I'd still use Speex over MP3.
Anyone who cares about sound quality ("Use the best tool for the job!", the unending cry of
Digital Citizen
Ogg may be #1 in quality, but I seriously doubt they're #2 in popularity...
Here's my estimate of the popularity of these formats. AAC is quite high based solely on the number of songs sold by iTunes.
1) MP3
2) AAC
3) WMA
4) Ogg?
5) Others
As a typical end user, not one of those reasons matters to me at all. Disk space is cheap. Why do I care about bandwidth, I'm not choosing a technology based on P2P service download speeds being an important factor. Even if I did, it wouldn't save me any bandwidth costs, it would save me the last 10% of a download wait. I'm never going to sell music and I don't give a crap about how Epic Games puts music in a game I don't even play. Or even in a game I do play. Games are priced at $5 increments, and there's little variation at that; if Epic is saving $1 per copy of UT2003 sold, they're not selling the game for $39 instead of $40. And I will never notice the different between a good-quality MP3 file and a good-quality OGG file. The comparison is only useful between high- and low-quality bitrates, independent of format. And while you assure me I can use Vorbis and never have to look back, the simple fact is that I've been using MP3 for 8 years and never once had to look back. The fact that it's "proprietary" couldn't matter less to me. "Propietary" and "bad" are not synonyms just because you decide to use them that way. Switching formats for any of these reasons is just the tail wagging the dog.
While Ogg is technically superior, it's never going to catch on because:
As a geek, I'd love the see technical superiority win, but I don't think Ogg is well-positioned to have any chance of taking marketshare from MP3s.