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.

Comments

I have thousands of songs

[Anonymous Coward]

accumulated over decades of life in MP3 format. I'm not going to abandon it anytime soon. Just isn't going to happen.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[Highdude702]

You can build one that's about the size of a Walkman for not much money at all. And nobody will stop supporting MP3 format ever. It's too widely used. Once most manufacturers stop making MP3 players somebody else will start. He'll those black plastic frisbees the old people used to use for music still has players made for them. And that's horrible audio.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[stealth_finger]

Yeah, unless there's a good free batch converter that can do my entire collection at once then just no (if there is please tell me). MP3 will probably be supported on pretty every device for the foreseeable. There's literally no reason not to.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[courteaudotbiz]

There's literally no reason not to.

Yes there's one. DRM. And this is why the music industry wants you to believe the MP3 format is dead.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Audacity can do this.
http://manual.audacityteam.org...

Re:I have thousands of songs

[Gr8Apes]

I abandoned MP3s in favor of lossless formats long ago. Funny thing, all of mine are DRM free.

Re: I have thousands of songs

[DewDude]

Nah man. SACD is the future.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[DrXym]

An MP3 encoded at 320 kbit/s through a good encoder is virtually indistinguishable from FLAC. I expect in a blind A/B test very few people would be able to tell them apart.

FLAC is certainly lossless and therefore capable of spitting out new encodings or file formats as they arise. I'm not sure it would justify holding an entire collection in that format although it might be a wise to rip new content to FLAC if space is not an issue.

Re: I have thousands of songs

[DontBeAMoran]

No! MiniDisc is the future!

Re:I have thousands of songs

[jabuzz]

It's 2017, so even if you had a collection of say 1000 albums you could easily store them in FLAC. For reference purposes last year I did my collection of music CD's which comes to just over 300 albums, many of which are compilation albums which skew the figures somewhat. However all of those albums, a 500x500px JPEG of the cover, a CSV file describing the tags for each file along with tagged FLAC and 256kbps MP3 for each track come to 148GB.

This is in the era of 2TB HDD's for under 100USD. The idea that space might be an issue for holding a music collection in FLAC (or ALAC if that is your poison) is ridiculous.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[TsuruchiBrian]

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.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[TsuruchiBrian]

Flac is an open format. DRM maybe a reason to use mp3 over formats, but not flac.

Re: I have thousands of songs

[Stormwatch]

No! DAT is the future!

Re:I have thousands of songs

[TsuruchiBrian]

Converting a lossy encoding to a lossless encoding doesn't make it lossless. It just makes it appear lossless.

The only reason to convert a lossy encoding to a lossless encoding is if someone pointing a gun to your head asks you to, and maybe not even then.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[TsuruchiBrian]

You're just using it wrong. Flac is not just for just sounding better than a 320Kpbs mp3 file to a casual listener. Flac is useful as an archival format that you can *also* efficiently stream. It's meant to be a better alternative to zipping uncompressed wave files.

You don't need to encode the latest beyonce album as flac. You might want to encode the recording of your wedding or the time you bootlegged your favorite artist at a dive bar as flac.

You might want to use flac if you are doing video editing, and you don't want to lose (a little) quality every time you re-encode the audio.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[TsuruchiBrian]

Did you forget to make sure those devices were turing-complete before buying them?

Re:I have thousands of songs

[Maxo-Texas]

Converting to another format won't improve the data that's there now.

So what you say is only true if you mean "acquire new copies encoded from the master files (CD) in ACC format.

Re: I have thousands of songs

[spire3661]

If Sony had allowed straight MP3s to be burned onto Mini-Discs, it would have beat the pants off the solid state MP3 players for the first 3-5 years they existed. The only thing that stopped mini-disc from dominating was Sony. I bought a mini-disc walkman after i had a 64 MB MP3 player that died. It wasnt until i got home i realized how terrible Sony's process for getting music on the device was.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[Rakarra]

Flac is an open format. DRM maybe a reason to use mp3 over formats, but not flac.

Flac is great for listening to at home (on a computer, say), but the files are too large for me to fit my library on my phone, which is my usual music player for the car.

So I'll use flac as the master, then transcode to mp3 for upload. They both have their uses!

Re:I have thousands of songs

[Beezlebub33]

How? Seriously, if you have a lossless digital format, and the frequency of sampling is higher than the Nyquist rate, how can it be superior? There is, literally, that is lost, right? I mean, other than some sort of hipster aura of superiority?

Re:I have thousands of songs

[thegarbz]

I have some monster cables to sell you.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[thegarbz]

I'll just keep MP3s as master and skip the trans-coding step. No one has proven in a blind test to be able to tell a higher rate MP3 apart from a FLAC file, and since I'm not a DJ or music producer I have no need for magic data that may help me manipulate audio but otherwise is inaudible.

Re:I have thousands of songs

[BronsCon]

You can't hear below 20Hz, but you can feel it. The same applies over 20KHz. A Nyquist rate of 22.05KHz or 24KHz leaves out a lot of frequencies you can feel.

Of course, so do shitty speakers and literally every pair of headphones, so this may or may not matter to you.

If you don't buy into the actual science behind all of this, you can go ahead and skip right to the last paragraph of this post and read why none of it really matters.

For portable playback, you're right, there's no difference, as you don't feel below 20Hz or above 20KHz with your ears, where your headphones or earbuds are mounted. For playback through shitty speakers, you're also right; you might have a subwoofer that will give you everything down to about 8Hz or so, but you're probably missing everything over 16KHz, so it really doesn't matter if your storage format can preserve those frequencies.

If you happen to have speakers capable of outputting well above 20KHz, suddenly it begins to matter whether your source and equipment can preserve those frequencies. In fact, a lot of perceived sound isn't actually heard but, rather, is the result of a beat frequency generated when two or more higher-than-audible frequencies interact; if that beat frequency is within the audible range, the listener will "hear" it, but only if those inaudible frequencies are reproduced faithfully and not simply discarded by a too-low sample rate or a high-pass filter intended to remove harmonic distortion introduced by a shitty or overdriven DAC.

I'm may not be an audio engineer professionally, because I have other talents that pay better, but I am a very capable audio engineer. My office, a 10' by 11' space which doubles as a hobby recording studio, is acoustically dead in its default configuration, though I can move two strategically-placed items and liven it right up. It's great for conference calls, as well as any type of music you might be in to. My very inexpensive speaker setup has no trouble outputting frequencies as high as 47KHz (my cats hate when I test this) and yes, when I play 47KHz through one speaker and 46KHz through the other, you can swear there's a 1KHz tone playing in the room; step out of the room, or far enough out of the soundfield of either speaker, and the tone disappears.

If you've ever experienced an "audible" sound that you couldn't locate the source of, that's what it was: a beat pattern generated by two inaudible tones. Remember, those tones are lost with headphones and shitty speakers, so they're not really missed if that's what you're listening on.

Mind you, I'm no speaker snob; I listen primarily on headphones and earbuds, and enjoy my digital (even streamed) music just fine through them. But, I do happen to have equipment that can produce much better sound and, well, I enjoy that when I use it, as well, provided the source can support it.

Coincidentally, you can get pretty close to clean vinyl recording 24 bits per sample at 192KHz, until you try to compress it. That's a hair under 1.1MB/sec (that's megabytes), or 1.3GB per LP side (20 minutes); and those are binary megabytes and gigabytes. A 128GB (that's decimal GB because that's how we measure storage for some stupid reason) SD card is only 116GB before being formatted, roughly 114GB after, and will hold about 44 LP records. Mind you, it will do so in slightly lower quality than the original clean vinyl, but it's sure great to have as the records age.

Awesome for portability, right? Well, actually, no. Remember, you don't benefit from feeding inaudible frequencies to your ears, which is what you're doing if you happen to have such a source and a pair of headphones that can produce those frequencies. What it is good for is suddenly disappearing in a pile of junk mail on your desk, because it's just so much smaller than the LP records it's being compared to. For portability, you're better off putting 16-bit 48KHz audio on that SD card, allowin

Re:I have thousands of songs

[rjstanford]

Yup. I've never seen any double-blind study that showed anything like that either. One thing that I really appreciate about music is that the current formats have indeed reached the "good enough" level. Sure, when I was younger and had a room in my house devoted to a massively high quality stereo I might have been able to hear a difference in soundstage between the original and a high quality rip, but even if I still had that setup I'm not convinced that I actually could. Now, there's literally no way, and I'm okay with that. The absolute value of convenience in being able to play basically any song at any time far outweighs a theoretical minor 99.99->99.999% qualitative improvement.

DRM

[Big Hairy Ian]

Please tell me the DRM is still patented

Why "dead"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> MP3 is not dead

Er...why would it be? This is how music is stored, shared and played for the most part, isn't it?

>> a suggestion that we move to a newer, still-patented format

I don't believe that Ogg Vorbis is patented. That's the next logical place to move, isn't it?

Re:Why "dead"?

[BeanThere]

Context: There have been a number of articles over the past few days claiming MP3 is dead (and usually 'incidentally' citing AAC as being the 'superior' 'de facto' 'standard' now - AAC incidentally still being patent-encumbered, and for which Fraunhofer still extract licensing fees) ... in other words, FUD claims have been issued to the media, seemingly to try 'scare' people off MP3 by claiming it's "dead" (when in fact it's now completely open), and trying to steer people toward AAC. I'm going to speculate that Fraunhofer are behind the FUD press releases.

Great Opportunity for an Ignore List

[EndlessNameless]

So apparently some people are incapable of understanding basic legalities or doing basic research before publishing.

While some are interpreting this development as the demise of the MP3 format

We can safely blacklist anyone who ran a story where this was presented as a fact or even a likelihood. Until something better takes the world by storm, the patent expiration will only help the format become more widely available.

Nice chance to see where there is more noise than signal though.

Never understood why MP3 was so popular

[wardrich86]

Never understood why, in a time of .ogg files, MP3 was always the defacto format. Ogg was free, and had better a far better compression:quality ratio. The fact that MP3 was ever popular is mindblowing. Glad to hear it's finally free, though.

Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular

[crow]

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?

Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular

[Daetrin]

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.

Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular

[Curupira]

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.

Re:Streaming will kill MP3 and its ilk.

[Bruinwar]

Funny, recently I had a mini-epiphany, opposite of you experience. I have 20-30 gigs of MP3s stored & never got them on my phone as planned. All because of streaming. I came to the conclusion just this past weekend that I am wasting my data steaming. My 128 gig SD card on my phone (S5) is mostly empty & it is time to copy over all my music. Anyone have suggestions for a good music player?

Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis

[arth1]

You just don't understand what lossy means in a compression context, it seems.
If you compress it and then uncompress it, and the result is not bit-for-bit identical, it's a lossy compression.

Non-Free Repositories

[waveclaw]

The lack of patent encumbered algorithms in MP3 means two things:

1. 1. The MP3 gstreamer codecs can move from the non-free repositories to free for Linux distributions. So no more complaints from software like Amarok about missing MP3 support libraries on your Linux desktops. That's one less step to setup Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora or openSuse. Even though there are plenty of reasons (CAD software, WMA support, etc) to seek out the non-official or non-free package sources I expect less use.
2. 2. Corporate users will be able to download, integrate and use the MP3 format in their projects with only a cursory approval from legal. I used to see quite a few video game projects use .ogg files and fmod for their sound. I expect to see more of them ship with MP3s instead.

Audio snobs won't stop arguing about the format of the week or FLAC verses DSD or the best bit rates on PCM encoded WAV files.

Mere consumers shall continue on with our plebeian fidelity sound as always.

Online buyers will continue to download low bit rate MP3s to squeeze a few more hundred tunes onto their Zune. Everyone you know will still play studio damaged music through tiny earbuds.

Re:Remember MP3.com?

[ichthus]

Remember amazon.com? Still alive, and still selling DRM-free mp3's.

Streaming will not kill stored music

[sjbe]

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.

Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Don't environmental noise levels play with this? And even ignoring those, surely the amount of information received by a microphone can't be infinite - I'm pretty sure that would involve a Big-Bang-like level of energy being transferred in the spectrum, for example.

OPUS @96 kbps

[DrYak]

To get anything reasonable, I get a maximum 4:1 compression ratio comparing lossless to lossy, 11:1 would be like listening to a concert through a cellular connection.

Try using OPUS at 96kbps
(Also by Xiph, the same guys who made Vorbis - but in collaboration with Skype this time)
Resulting quality is incredibly close to lossless.

(It's also patent-free, consieded a IETF web standard and probably already supported by your current smartphone)

OGG also needs more processing power

[rsilvergun]

to do all the cool things it does. That meant more expensive hardware. The $50/512MB mp3 players I was buying in the early 2000s didn't run ogg, but they were $200 cheaper than players that did.

Music

[DrYak]

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.)

---

BTW: A piano is also bound by the laws of physics and the amount of different vibrations it can produce isn't infinite either.

Great example of how Patents should work

[Sir Holo]

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).

Re:Great example of how Patents should work

[thegarbz]

This is an example of how the Patent system should work.

What a popular format encumbered and thus prevented from being included in the most basic of applications even 15 years after many alternatives were released and the purpose of its original inception (lack of disk space) is gone?

There's nothing wrong with patents. There is something VERY wrong with a patent on a mathematical algorithm in a fast paced field such as technology lasting TWENTY BLOODY YEARS.

OPUS

[DrYak]

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.

AOMedia's AV-1

[DrYak]

AOMedia's AV-1 is attempting to be exactly that but for video.

A codec that is either patent free or whose patent are free.
Free code implementation.
supported by nearly anyone involved in video, including content providers (includes both Google and Netflix, so a sizeable portion of all video played), software makes (Mozilla, VLC, etc.) and hardware manufacturer (AMD, Intel, Broadcom, ARM, etc.)

And there are quite a few big developpers involved :
- Xiph (makers of Daala), Google (VP10) and Cisco (thor)

It's going to do exactly what OPUS did to audio.
probably within a year.

Until then it's either H264 / AVC if you can afford the patents or Google's VP-9.
Stay away from H265 / HEVC, it's a trap (that was the actual incentive to start AOMedia)

Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis

[DontBeAMoran]

But since your organic human ears are extremely limited in their ability to capture the sound wave, your brain will never know the difference.

Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis

[Kjella]

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.

Video games will switch to Opus

[tepples]

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.

aoTuV q5 is transparent

[tepples]

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.

Re:Reasons not to.

[Chas]

MP3 will probably be supported on pretty every device for the foreseeable. There's literally no reason not to.

There's a very clear reason not to :
Force users to rebuy the song they are used to listen to.

Armor piercing question: How is this a concern for the makers of MP3 PLAYERS and software that plays/encodes MP3s?

Hint: It isn't...

Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis

[SuricouRaven]

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.