NPR: MP3 audio file format Is Officially Dead, According To Its Creators

[satam55]

"The death of the MP3 was announced in a conference room in Erlangen, Germany, in the spring of 1995."

So opens Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free, an investigation into the forced digitization and subsequent decimation of the music business, from which it has only very recently started to recover. That ironic conference room eulogy actually took place just before the compression algorithm caught on (don't worry, we'll explain in a bit). Soon, the MP3 not only upended the recording industry but, thanks to the iPod, also contributed to Apple's late-'90s transformation into one of the most successful companies in history. (On Tuesday, the tech giant passed $800 billion in market capitalization, the first U.S. company to do so.)

But now, 22 years later, the MP3 truly is dead, according to the people who invented it. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a division of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3's development in the late '80s, recently announced that its "licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated."

Bernhard Grill, director of that Fraunhofer division and one of the principals in the development of the MP3, told NPR over email that another audio format, AAC — or "Advanced Audio Coding," which his organization also helped create — is now the "de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones." He said AAC is "more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality."

As Witt illustrates throughout his excellent opening chapters, the MP3, before upending the musical world as we knew it, almost died in the research lab. The team of engineers that invented the format was attempting to make it possible to send audio over telephone lines, which could only transmit small amounts of data. Fraunhofer — in competing for the legitimacy it needed to persuade tech companies to actually use MP3s, and so actually make money — hit numerous speed bumps. It was repeatedly beleaguered by clever corporate sabotage and later by piracy. Other failures hinged on the need for the world to catch up with the technology's possibilities: Along the way, one computer engineer on the team had a patent for a music streaming service denied by the German government because it was technologically absurd at the time. Another innovation the team failed to leverage? The portable MP3 player.

In early 1995, the format was on life support, with one licensing deal being the use of the technology by hockey arenas across the U.S. (That spring meeting in which the MP3 was declared dead came months later, after another failed pitch that denied it being standardized and widely adopted.) A little later, Fraunhofer began giving away the software that consumers needed to turn compact discs into MP3s at home. The rest is recent history.

So is it the end of an era? We may still use MP3s, but when the people who spent the better part of a decade creating it say the jig is up, we should probably start paying attention. AAC is indeed much better — it's the default setting for bringing CDs into iTunes now — and other formats are even better than it, though they also take up mountains of space on our hard drives.

And it's not just that more efficient and complete ways of storing music have been developed. There was a deeper problem. The engineers who developed the MP3 were working with incomplete information about how our brains process sonic information, and so the MP3 itself was working on false assumptions about how holistically we hear. As psychoacoustic research has evolved, so has the technology that we use to listen. New audio formats and products, with richer information and that better address mobile music streaming, are arriving.

Deezer, a music streaming company relatively popular in its native France, launched in the U.S. offering "high-resolution" streaming, for double the price of a Spotify account. Tidal did the same. Neil Young tried his hand with the hotly tipped Pono. While all three are not exactly taking over the world — Pono, in fact, is officially dead, rebranded "Xstream" — the record business has put its stamp of approval on the idea, at least. "Master Quality Authenticated" is a promising new technology that uses a type of audio origami to spare cellular data when necessary and to "bloom" in quality when it's not — though it has drawn pointed criticism for being a closed loop that allows for recording industry cash-ins. It wouldn't be the first time.

The formats that convey art and media to us also delineate that media; vinyl records require a session-interrupting flip, which The Beatles brilliantly exploited by creating an infinite loop of gibberish at the end of Sgt. Pepper's second side. The VHS tape in both image and sound was as soft and fuzzy as a worn teddy bear, while new high-definition televisions render images perhaps too robotically, tracking movement like T-1000. The MP3, as mentioned, enabled millions or billions of song listens, just with incorrect biological assumptions. The lesson seems to be, simply, that our media will always be as exactly imperfect as we are.

 

[Barnett114]

It's not dead, it's now open source

Meaning, you no longer have to pay royalties to have your device use the MP3 standards

 

[street heat]

all my music is mp3 format

 

[PS5 Pro]

all my music is mp3 format

my mom had an 8track, my kids would look at you the same way I did her

 

[Spaceman Piff]

guess i'll switch over when the pirates switch over

 

[The Devil's Advocate]

my mom had an 8track, my kids would look at you the same way I did her

ain't nobody got space to hold, nor data to download, 300 albums of wav formatted files.

so unless y'all got the new dope out... small, high quality files.. mp3 is where it's at... shyt i got 42 days of music on my itunes.. ain't a drive alive storing that

 

[G-Zeus]

meh.. sure the coding is not used as much.. but the idea behind it is still very much alive...

encoded wave files to take less space was always the reason to go CD-less

 

[el_oh_el]

ain't nobody got space to hold, nor data to download, 300 albums of wav formatted files.

so unless y'all got the new dope out... small, high quality files.. mp3 is where it's at... shyt i got 42 days of music on my itunes.. ain't a drive alive storing that

You sure about that?
Anyway FLAC and AAC are the way to go

 

[PS5 Pro]

ain't nobody got space to hold, nor data to download, 300 albums of wav formatted files.

so unless y'all got the new dope out... small, high quality files.. mp3 is where it's at... shyt i got 42 days of music on my itunes.. ain't a drive alive storing that

AAC replaced it, and is better.
Wav (not even flak)...ok, well better is coming, better is here. 42days of music is a joke. How about living life for42days. Cuz if you die, that hdd isn't going to your grandkids

 

[The Devil's Advocate]

You sure about that?
Anyway FLAC and AAC are the way to go

AAC replaced it, and is better.
Wav (not even flak)...ok, well better is coming, better is here. 42days of music is a joke. How about living life for42days. Cuz if you die, that hdd isn't going to your grandkids

And how big are those files

Why the hell wouldn't my hard drive go to my grandkids? They gonna have computers right? They like music right?

It's 2017 and if my folks die, I'm getting their record collection. You know how many mixtapes and can't find music I got on that bytch. An MP3 album might be 100 mb, maybe 120. A cd uncompressed is damn near a gig.

I'm not saying anybody is wrong here. Of course there are better files. Of course. But people want compact shyt that don't take up space, that can be easily moved and emailed around.

shyt most people don't even hear the difference. Which is why tidal ain't the savior they think it is, and most streaming apps still using MP3

 

[el_oh_el]

And how big are those files

Why the hell wouldn't my hard drive go to my grandkids? They gonna have computers right? They like music right?

It's 2017 and if my folks die, I'm getting their record collection. You know how many mixtapes and can't find music I got on that bytch. An MP3 album might be 100 mb, maybe 120. A cd uncompressed is damn near a gig.

I'm not saying anybody is wrong here. Of course there are better files. Of course. But people want compact shyt that don't take up space, that can be easily moved and emailed around.

shyt most people don't even hear the difference. Which is why tidal ain't the savior they think it is, and most streaming apps still using MP3

FLAC is uncompressed and is usually only about 2-400mb. But I get where you're coming from.

 

[The Devil's Advocate]

FLAC is uncompressed and is usually only about 2-400mb. But I get where you're coming from.

Thank you for that info breh. I didn't know they were only that size. That might just make me switch

 

[Zero]

"Only" 400MB huh

 

[PS5 Pro]

Thank you for that info breh. I didn't know they were only that size. That might just make me switch

Bruh, mediums change. So you still listen to cassette tapes? Of course not. Do you still use CD's? You'd be in the minority.

Your hard drive/mp3 collection will be like listening to a SNES synthesizer to your grand kids. They won't even like the music you have saved. Future music will have more cowbell

AndI mentioned flac in my first post (my phone autocorrects that word. It just tried to do it ) But, you might wanna look into this post below...

"Only" 400MB huh

 

[el_oh_el]

"Only" 400MB huh

Compared to a disc which is between 7-800mb yeah