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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.
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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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).
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.