MP3 is put out to pasture

[dlevere]

Fraunhofer IIS, the developers of the MP3 audio compression format, announced that they are ceasing their licensing program. In a blog post, spokesman Matthias Rose says that it's had a good 20-year run and is obsolete. But it's also true that the decoding patents expired last year, and the last encoding patents are soon to follow.

http://boingboing.net/2017/05/01/mp3...o-pasture.html

[soprano1]

I guess music "releases" will use lossless formats like FLAC as standard, and MP3 converted files for people with toasters or music devices that lack lossless support.

[bungholio]

I haven't read any of the junk about sound file formats in over 10 years. There was too much junk and too much opinion so you could never really get the unquestionably correct facts. I didn't know what was special about mp4 at the time, I just assumed it was some barely better patented thing used by Apple. Every format at the time people complained about for one reason or another. People claimed many of them couldn't do high pitched sounds or play back human vocals very well, but they complemented OGG Vorbis format or whatever for being smaller file sizes than mp3 and supposedly sounding better in every way with vocals and percussion/bass/everything really. I don't know if there's any issues with old WAV format files aside from their massive file sizes. FLAC slightly baffled me because I would decrease the file size and make the sound very terrible at the same time and then convert it back to higher quality and get the quality back, but I always wondered why it just didn't convert to high quality on the spot from low file size crap quality unless it was too CPU intensive at the time or something. I can't remember what is on music CDs you buy at the store, I think their format was just called VBR, they had massive file sizes just like WAV files did.

[MathUser]

Well, I still use a youtube to mp3 program so I don't see me stopping to use mp3 for a while.