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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.
accumulated over decades of life in MP3 format. I'm not going to abandon it anytime soon. Just isn't going to happen.
It's technically superior so why not?
Because with today's storage capacities and transfer speeds, the benefits of lossy audio compression over lossless are negligible.
Whether I fill up 2% of my drive with lossy audio or 4% with lossless isn't making much of a difference. Knowing that it's lossy does make a difference, even when I can't hear a difference.
Also, my DAWs don't work with the "technically superior" Ogg/Vorbis...
Been a premium Spotify user ever since and never looked back.
Nothing wrong with that but what do you plan to do if/when Spotify goes belly up? Not saying it will or won't but it's certainly a realistic possibility since Spotify has never to my knowledge made a profit.
I disagree strongly that streaming will kill stored music. It will complement it nicely but it's not a replacement for many people. Streaming is useless in circumstances where you don't have a reliable or fast internet connection (like on a plane) or if you are data limited for some reason. It also ties you to a business which you may or may not be interested in subscribing to. Plus one of the nice things about stored music is that it can't be taken away from you very easily.
Speaking solely for myself even a relatively cheap streaming service would be a waste of money for me - I simply wouldn't use it enough to justify the cost. (I dropped Netflix for exactly that reason and I watch more video than I listen to music) And I'm not unique in that regard. Streaming has some real advantages and I think it has a big future but it's not going to kill stored music.
I'm guessing you're relatively new here, as in on Earth, because for those of us who grew up through it it's pretty obvious.
Reason 1: First mover advantage. Mp3 was initially released in 1993. Serious work on Ogg Vorbis didn't start until 1998, the format was frozen in 2000, and the first stable release was in 2002. So mp3 had 7-9 years to build up a lead. Which led to...
Reason 2: Network effect. Quite literally, in this case, because the birth of mp3 went hand in hand with the birth of the internet, and very quickly the rise of mp3 sharing sites and applications, Napster most prominent among them. So for a significant portion of that early period mp3s were getting shared all over the place leading to early adopters quickly accumulating relatively large libraries, which led to...
Reason 3: Vendor lock-in. So now you have a library of thousands of mp3s, you're going to want a media player that can play all the files you already have. Getting one that can even play Ogg Vorbis wasn't even an option for most people until 2002, and for a long time after that it wasn't trivial to get a player with Ogg Vorbis support. And a lot of people didn't want to switch away from a player that they were familiar with that could play all their current files to some new player so they could take advantage of another format as well. And for at least some people they didn't want to bother with the hassle of having to keep two sets of files organized. Unless you want to argue that people should have replaced all the older mp3s with ogg vorbis files, which would be difficult, time-consuming, and probably expensive for most people, and thus even more of a vendor lock-in.
Now all of these are issues that might have been overcome if Ogg Vorbis was superior in _every_ way, but there was this one other issue...
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...
Reason 5: Most people aren't audiophiles. Most of the time i couldn't tell the difference between an ogg file and an mp3 with a decent bitrate. And even when i can tell the difference... i don't really care. Being able to hear tiny differences when comparing small segments side by side does not lead to me enjoying the lower quality version any less when listening to it in isolation. So the cost of "upgrading" to ogg would be huge, in time, money, and hard drive space, and as a non-audiophile the benefit would be minuscule.
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No, every piece of music is lossy because analog cannot be encoded into digital without an infinite amount of loss.
Usually, we talk in terms of music.
we don't try to record every possible vibration in existance in the universe, we try to record *sound*.
and the human body, due to limitation caused by laws of physics, has a very narrow set of vibration that it can hear and interpret as sound.
you can't hear ultrasound. there's no physiological way for you to hear them. thus there's no point in storing them.
There's a range of frequencies (tactile can feel up to dozens/hundrer of hertz, ears can feel up to somewhere between 10kHz and 20kHz).
There's a range of intensities (between impossible to hear, and causes pain/hearing loss).
By virtue of mathematics of information theory, every possible sound that you could ever hear can nicely fit within a 44kHz to 48kHz samplerate and 16bits to 24bits sample size.
Everything beyond that is just overkill, you're not physically equipped to percieve it. (That would be like trying to see UV, X-Ray, etc.)
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BTW: A piano is also bound by the laws of physics and the amount of different vibrations it can produce isn't infinite either.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This is an example of how the Patent system should work.
Fraunhofer invented something good. They Patented it. Patents last 20 years, after which they expire forever.
Fraunhofer enjoyed the monopoly on use of this technology, but only for a short time. Now, the Public owns it (it is in the public domain).
Until something better takes the world by storm, the patent expiration will only help the format become more widely available.
Let me intoduce your to this thing called OPUS.
(It's also by Xiph, the people behind Vorbis, but this time in collaboration with Skype).
It's patent-free, it's free.
it's accepted as a IETF web-standard, it's supported by web browser.
it's already used by lots of voice chat application (Skype - obviously - but also e.g.: WhatsApp)
your smartphone probably already supports it (if it's a recent enough version of android).
there are even informal standards to use it in Digital Radio Mondial (the digital cousin of AM radio).
And it has the best audio quality ever.
Beats nearly anything else in ABX tests.
Except maybe ultra small bandwidths ( 4 kbits ) which are beyond its intended usage anyway.
so it is taking the world by storm (chances are if an app on your smartphone deals with audio, it supports it)
it's just a very silent storm.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I used to see quite a few video game projects use .ogg files [...] . I expect to see more of them ship with MP3s instead.
Unlike a web application, a PC-native video game doesn't have to rely on codecs built into the user's existing operating system. Thus the codec choice depends on licensing and rate-distortion efficiency. Yes, I expect games to switch away from Vorbis, but not to MP3 because MP3 is less space-efficient than Vorbis at a given fidelity level. They'll probably switch to Opus, which beats both MP3 and Vorbis at fidelity per bit.
Everything is superior to MP3. Vorbis, Opus, AAC, ATRAC, even (ugh) WMA. Because MP3 is simply dated.
But sometimes dated works. It's universally supported. Every device, every platform, from PCs to doorbells. The same reason GIF and JPEG still stick around, when there are superior alternatives now.
It is not dead, but migrate to ogg vorbis anyway, it compress more with better quality and it is a totally open and free codec. Even the license (BSD) is one that allows anyone to add ogg vorbis support to any app or firmware
So yes, ignore mp3 and use ogg vorbis... and demand hardware with support for it
Higuita