Mp3 is still the best audio format
MP3, the king of music formats, has retired from the stage of history and been replaced by AAC. What is the origin?
Even someone who knows nothing about audio encoding may not have listened to MP3.
This audio format emerged in the 1990s. For most post-80s and post-90s generations, having an MP3 player capable of playing this audio format is one of the best childhood memories.
But now it’s time to say goodbye to MP3s. Recently Fraunhofer IIS, which invented this audio format, announced that it had rescinded some patents related to MP3 and officially took it off the stage of history.
Furthermore, Matthias Rose, director of the institute, said:
The Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format has become the standard for mobile music and video downloads. This format is more efficient, more functional, and has a lower bit rate than MP3, and is used in both broadcast TV and radio to deliver high-quality audio.
This means that Fraunhofer IIS wants to replace MP3 with the AAC format below.
How did MP3 become the king of music formats?
There are generally two main types of audio file formats, one is a lossless compressed data format and the other is a lossy compressed data format.
MP3 is the most popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format, and is supported by almost all terminals and software.
The birth of MP3, but also for 30 years. In 1987, Fraunhofer IIS in Germany began the development of the music compression format. They spent 4 years to improve the algorithm and sound quality, and finally developed this very advanced lossy compression audio format in 1993 and determined the extension .mp3.
The purpose of developing this audio compression technology is to greatly reduce the amount of audio data. Knowing that hard drives at the time were relatively small (like 500 MB), compressing all compressible data was essential for any computer user.
How does Fraunhofer IIS do it? During the invention of MP3, developers studied psychoacoustics and determined that some of the audio data is not important to the human ear. MP3 achieves the purpose of compressing the file size by discarding this part of the data, and can successfully compress the audio file to 1/10 of the original size.
After that, from the first half of 1995 to the end of the 1990s, MP3 began to flourish on the Internet. The “much smaller file but also good sounding” MP3 began its era of dominating audio formats. There were even many people at the time who believed that all digital music files were MP3s.
