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MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org)
The commentary around IIS Fraunhofer and Technicolor terminating their MP3 licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software has been amusing. While some are interpreting this development as the demise of the MP3 format, others are cheering about MP3s finally being free. Developer and commentator Marco Arment tries to prevail sense: MP3 is no less alive now than it was last month or will be next year -- the last known MP3 patents have simply expired. So while there's a debate to be had -- in a moment -- about whether MP3 should still be used today, Fraunhofer's announcement has nothing to do with that, and is simply the ending of its patent-licensing program (because the patents have all expired) and a suggestion that we move to a newer, still-patented format. MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it's good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it's finally free.
Compatibility.
I can play MP3 files in both my cars, my phone, our iPad, you name it. It's natively supported by everything out there. Ogg, not so much.
Even in cases where Ogg might work, I know MP3 works, so why bother checking? Why should I rip my CDs to a format that might not work everywhere?
Is it better? Sure, there are technical aspects that are better, but should I care? Storage is so cheap, so a 320kbps MP3 is as good as the original for me. Where's the motivation to even see if another format works?
flac is just a waste of space. Ive tried two songs one flac and one mp3 and there is no difference in quality at all that i can hear. People who bigup flac are just the same type of audiophiles that need to buy monster cables.
haha flame on.
Winamp was never for sale, and yet I don't think its going away any time soon.
Never understood why, in a time of .ogg files, MP3 was always the defacto format.
It's because OGG didn't always exist dummy! By the time OGG showed up, MP3 was already everywhere. I may be showing my age but perhaps you are too young to remember the days of MP3.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Remember amazon.com? Still alive, and still selling DRM-free mp3's.
sig: sauer
No, every piece of music is lossy because analog cannot be encoded into digital without an infinite amount of loss.
This is a piece of audiophile bullshit that makes no more sense than the tortoise and the hare "paradox". For those who don't know it, the tortoise starts with a head start but whenever the hare gets to where the tortoise was it's moved a little further so the hare must run an infinite number of distances like 100m, 10m, 1m, 0.1m, 0.01m, 0.001m and so on to "infinity". Same with analog, the infinite loss is also infinitely insignificant.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Aoyumi's Tuned Vorbis encoder (aoTuV) is believed transparent at quality 5, which is roughly 160 kbps.
And you're right that Opus is too new. It still has artifacts on "killer samples" in the 128-192 kbps range that make it little better than Vorbis at transparency under quiet listening conditions. But it wins listening tests in the 64-96 kbps range for streaming to relatively noisy vehicular and outdoor environments.
Please don't ever convert your entire mp3 collection to flac. The point of flac is that it is lossless compression. If your collection is already mp3, converting to flac will make your files slightly larger and provide the false impression that the data is a lossless encoding from an uncompressed source (e.g. audio CD), with no benefit whatsoever.
There are batch converters that will convert anything (including mp3) to flac. Maybe some of the more caring converters will warn you about not converting mp3 to flac.
Reason 4: File size. Everyone talks about how space is cheap these days. Well that wasn't always the case. For many people their music collection was expanding rapidly at a time where space to store it was much harder/more expensive to come by. Perhaps the compression has improved since the early days, but when Ogg Vorbis first started making waves i checked it out, and the ogg files at the time were almost ten times the size of the equivalent mp3 files. Meaning my 75-80 GB of mp3s would have forced me to upgrade to a 1 TB drive, which would have been prohibitively expensive in 2005. And the other issue i ran into while testing the new format was...
Aren't you confusing OGG Vorbis with FLAC? I've lived the same period of time and heck no, Vorbis files never were 10x larger than MP3 files.