The MP3 format changed the music industry
The MP3 format revolutionized the world of music. For better or for worse, this audio coding format made listening to (and sharing) music through the Internet popularized in such a way that the entire industry ended up adopting this or other solutions to end up making the leap to a model in which the physical format yielded prominence to downloads and streaming.
The technology, however, was subject to patents that were defended by Technicolor, but these patents – still in force for encoders, for example – fully expired on April 16, 2017. MP3 is now more free than ever.
Never before, MP3 patents
Those responsible for Fraunhofer IIS explained a few days ago how “on April 23, 2017, the Technicolor mp3 licensing program for certain patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS related to the mp3 has expired.”
Fraun
In that message, thanks to all those who have licensed the technology for their support of a format that became the “defacto audio codec worldwide for the last two decades”, and highlighted that even though there are more efficient audio codecs, mp3 is still “very popular with consumers”. MP3’s success paralleled that of the legendary Winamp, the player that became that symbol of a change of scene in the audio industry.
Those patents have been very beneficial for their owners: it is estimated that thanks to them the Fraunhofer Society achieved an income that reached 100 million euros in 2005. Those amounts of money caused many others to try to take a piece of that juicy cake, and lawsuits and lawsuits regarding who owned what in the MP3 segment have been frequent.
Alternatives exist, but MP3 doesn’t seem to lose strength
The MP3 format (MPEG-1 Layer 3) has arguably been the most popular “lossy” audio format — we lose data in encoding — but it certainly isn’t technically the best. The rise of the format and its deficiencies made in fact that many others tried to develop alternatives with which to conquer the market.
Mp31
Among those codecs is the AAC family of formats, which does not require the payment of licenses to stream or distribute content in that format. Of course, there are patents for the development of AAC codecs, which forces those who implement Open Source software that takes advantage of this format to distribute it only with the code, as in the case of the famous FFMpeg.
This format has become enormously popular, and is used by Apple’s devices and services, but it is also widely used by Google both on its Android platform and on YouTube. Many other products include native support for the reproduction of these contents nowadays, both for being royalty-free and for the improvements in the coding that allow that at similar bitrates the quality of AAC audio tends to be superior to that of MP3s.
Another of the great protagonists is Vorbis, the audio codec that is part of the well-known Ogg Vorbis container and that offers even more advantages in terms of patents or royalties: all its specifications are in the public domain, the libraries are published through a license BSD, while the tools to encode and decode files in this format are licensed under the LGPL.
This format is not as widespread as AAC, but it is still very relevant today and in fact it is used massively on Spotify, the most popular streaming service worldwide today.
These two examples are combined with the presence of a good number of alternatives, both with and without loss, which have been gaining some ground in recent years. None of them, however, has ceased to diminish the relevance of the MP3 format, which remains one of the key options for end users when it comes to enjoying music in digital format.
And if it was previously feasible to do so, the end of patents in full should even further support the use of this codec that, as we said, changed the music industry forever.
