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MP3 is so outdated now it's better to just use FLAC or AAC.

The nice thing about FLAC and ALAC is you can transcode losslessly between them. Apple devices don't support FLAC but they do support ALAC. I converted a bunch of FLAC to ALAC and deleted the FLAC, since if I ever need it again I can convert back with no loss.
 
So now the patents are up right? Meaning no requirement to pay them to use?
That would be correct.

The MP3 spec was published in 1992. It is generally considered impossible to get a new patent for something that has already been published.

In Europe, where patents expire 20 years after the first filing date (and up to a year after that for patents filed elsewhere), that means it all expired in 2013.

In the US, its uglier. For patents filed before 1995, they expire either 20 years after filing or 17 years after issue, whichever comes later. It is generally believed that the last US MP3-related patent (held by Technicolor) expired in April 2017 - last month.

So yes, if you want to write your own MP3 encoder/decoder software, there are no longer any patents in your way. Of course, if it's not all original code, there may still be copyright issues (commercial, GPL, etc.) affecting your use of third-party code, but that's a different discussion altogether.
 
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Patents. A soon to be relic of the past.

I don't know about that. Aren't patents (or rather licensing of them) a money maker for the people who invent products? I admit, I could be totally wrong about that, but if I'm correct, why would someone want to invent something if they won't be paid for their work?
 
The MP3 format has not been terminated. Actually, quite the opposite. The Fraunhofer Institute ended licensing on the MP3 format because the patent ran out. They no longer have the ability to license it because they no longer own the patent on it. MP3 is now public domain.

Wow! Your explanation is 100 times better than the crap I've read so far across the internet.
 
With 256gb iPhones, FLAC should be the standard. I still buy CDs and encode them to Apple Lossless.

There's a few people I know who either can't really hear the difference between lossless & aac, or don't care. My dad's hard of hearing, so he probably couldn't tell the difference. I have decent hearing, but I don't have good enough speakers to tell the difference, nor do I really care. AAC is good enough for me. Besides, not everyone can afford/want a 256 GB iPhone. And if they did, they might be more interested in apps & movies.

Don't get me wrong. If that's what you want to do, more power to you. Just hoping you realize & appreciate that not everyone feels the same way.
 
With 256gb iPhones, FLAC should be the standard. I still buy CDs and encode them to Apple Lossless.

Considering that those 256gb phones lack headphone jacks it might be pointless for mainstream. Think we need to boost wireless streaming quality first.
Personally I'm fine with Bluetooth but I steam music.
 
With 256gb iPhones, FLAC should be the standard. I still buy CDs and encode them to Apple Lossless.

A 256 GB iPhone can't hold my music in FLAC, so I think that's a really daft idea. And the energy used by playing music is largely related to the number of megabytes that need to be read, so FLAC eats batteries a lot faster than AAC. All in all, not a good idea.

BTW. FLAC ≠ ALAC.
 
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With 256gb iPhones, FLAC should be the standard. I still buy CDs and encode them to Apple Lossless.
Same. I buy CD and rip songs down to convert to lossless format. XLC on Mac saves me lots of time on converting songs to iTunes library. One click and done.
A 256 GB iPhone can't hold my music in FLAC, so I think that's a really daft idea. And the energy used by playing music is largely related to the number of megabytes that need to be read, so FLAC eats batteries a lot faster than AAC. All in all, not a good idea.

BTW. FLAC ≠ ALAC.
Really? But I cannot notice any difference on battery life issue because playing lossless music.
MP3? My whole library is still encoded with RealPlayer.
Rmvb... btw now who still uses real player? This thing is dead alongside 2005.
 
According to the Germany-based Fraunhofer Institute, this is because more modern digital audio coding formats have emerged, namely "Advanced Audio Coding," or AAC.
No. Just no. They said the licensing program has ended (because the patents ran out), and they also noted that newer encoding formats have replaced many of the uses of MP3. (They may have noted this to gently nudge people in the direction of formats where they still hold patents.)

They very much did not say that the licensing is over because more modern formats have emerged.

If I said "today is my birthday" and "there was an earthquake today" and you reported that "Carl said there was an earthquake today because of his birthday", you would not just be wrong, you would be doing doing the public a disservice.

This kind of assigning motivations or causes where none exist and then blithely reporting those conjured-up bits as fact is one of the major problems with news sources today, and it's damaging our society. Please don't do that.
 
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... MP3, the digital audio coding format that Apple used for music downloads on the original iPod

Uhh, what? No. The iTunes Music Store (now iTunes Store) used to use FairPlay (DRM-encoded) AAC files. Now it's just plain AAC. At no point did it ever use MP3, nor was MP3 ever the only format ever supported for playback on or uploading to an iPod.

Someone please tell me what I'm missing here.

EDIT: I am aware that iTMS wasn't launched until the release of the 3rd-gen iPod, which was also the first to support AAC, though I didn't know earlier models didn't at least support some form of MP4. That could explain the "coding format that Apple used" thing, except before iTMS, Apple didn't really "use" anything because it was the user (maybe they meant to say iTunes would rip locally to MP3 by default?). Additionally, MP3 was never the only support format on the iPod--at least WAV and AIFF were also supported, though probably not very popular due to limited storage space on the devices.
 
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Uhh, what? No. The iTunes Music Store (now iTunes Store) used to use FairPlay (DRM-encoded) AAC files. Now it's just plain AAC. At no point did it ever use MP3, nor was MP3 ever the only format ever supported for playback on or uploading to an iPod.

Someone please tell me what I'm missing here.
What you're missing is that the iPod was introduced two years before the Music Store. Originally the iPod only played MP3, AIFF, & WAV formats. "Music downloads" doesn't refer to Music Store downloads, it refers to downloading music from one's computer to the iPod.
 
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RIP MP3. I remember downloading songs from unsecured FTP sites over a 33.6K modem in the late 90s and playing them with WinAmp (or some ugly, early player) because I was like 12 and didn't know any better. When I got a 56K modem and figured out how to encode them to WAV and burn them onto a CD I felt like a genius. My grandpa was a DoD engineer running a multimillion dollar research lab so he had a pretty tricked out home PC for the time, and it had a really early CD burner before they had buffer underrun (B.U.R.N.) protection, so he started getting upset at how many coasters I was making! It was getting to the point that just buying the CDs would be cheaper. Those pre-Napster years were so innocent, lol.

I'm so glad Apple came along and saved me from this horrid UI (and made buying digital music easy and affordable):
 
MP3 is like the QWERTY keyboard. It's good enough for people to use, so it's going to last forever. And anyone who had to make a business decision "We can't afford to add an MP3 encoder to our software" now can. MP3 just got stronger, not weaker.

Yet people that have changed their MP3 files to AAC files are not noticing that they lost something I'm thinking.

A higher fidelity conversion of a low fidelity source is still crap, right? I remember the 'AAD' CD's after they first came out. There is nothing quite like digitally reproduced tape hiss...
 
I don't know about that. Aren't patents (or rather licensing of them) a money maker for the people who invent products? I admit, I could be totally wrong about that, but if I'm correct, why would someone want to invent something if they won't be paid for their work?
Yes but they are a monopoly. I believe in personal property but not government enforced monoplies especially on intangible ideas. Blockchain and open source will take over.
 
Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. ;)

I bet there are still far more MP3s than AACs in music collections out there. Large online stores such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Groove still sell music in MP3 format. Also, many people don't realize that the quality of an encoding isn't just determined by the format, but largely by the encoder implementation. MP3 encoders have made huge progress since the early days. Recent versions of LAME still compete very well with the best AAC encoders at higher bitrates.
 
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Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. ;)

I bet there are still far more MP3s than AACs in music collections out there. Large online stores such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Groove still sell music in MP3 format. Also, many people don't realize that the quality of an encoding isn't just determined by the format, but largely by the encoder implementation. MP3 encoders have made huge progress since the early days. Recent versions of LAME still compete very well with the best AAC encoders at higher bitrates.
I'm old enough to remember MP3s skipping, lol. If the computer slightly slowed down, or the song was longer or encoded a little bit higher, it would skip. This was on a Pentium II in late '97, which was cutting edge at the time.
 
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Of course Fraunhofer would want to move on to AAC, they share a patent for that format too and receive licence fees from device manufacturers and codec vendors.
Well after all it is a non profit public research institute that uses all its income for further research. So the money does not end up in some greedy wall street pockets ...
 
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