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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.
Please tell me the DRM is still patented
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
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?
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.
The lack of patent encumbered algorithms in MP3 means two things:
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.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Remember amazon.com? Still alive, and still selling DRM-free mp3's.
sig: sauer
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).
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
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.
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.