MP3 'died' and nobody noticed

[White Stripes]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/16/mp3_dies_nobody_noticed/

The owner of the MP3 format killed it off last month – and it's taken three weeks for anyone to notice. With the last of the patents protecting the MPEG Audio Layer III expiring, the Fraunhofer Institute has declined to renew the IP and terminated its licensing programme.

"Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3," the Institute said in a statement.

heh cool

[GhostShip]

Sounds more like its now free for all, I like to think of MP3's as akin to JPGs, I prefer PNG but detest the size of many of the alternative audio formats. MP3 shall live on for a long while yet I'm sure.

[Pri]

In pirate circles it is the defacto lossy standard. Using LAME to encode it to both v0 VBR and 320 CBR is basically every scene and P2P release. All the big music sites like WCD (now gone), RED, APL, NWCD, Petros etc all release in MP3 for everything.

AAC and OGG have not caught on with pirates because they're not as ubiquitously supported when it comes to device playback. Personally I was getting MP3 320's but I've switched to FLAC now since it's lossless. I can then transcode it in to whatever format I need (ALAC, AAC, MP3 etc) for the specific playback device I'm using.

[White Stripes]

I can then transcode it in to whatever format I need (ALAC, AAC, MP3 etc) for the specific playback device I'm using.

while im definitely with you on FLAC/ALAC i also download ogg opus and other odd formats such as mod xm sid ym (the list goes on)... i learned my lesson that an android device with a large capacity SD card running VLC keeps me from having to transcode... cos i got tired of the whatever to mp3 game really fast..

Using LAME to encode it to both v0 VBR and 320 CBR is basically every scene and P2P release.

which is unfortunate since mp3 is so inefficient that 320 CBR is wasting a lot of bandwidth... but i digress.. i know its for compatibility..

[MinersLantern]

meh, 320 MP3 still sounds way nicer when plugging the source into my cars stereo. A trillion times better than anything by normal FM radio.