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Mp3 is still the best audio format

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Mp3 is still the best audio format

Does this phrase remind you of the fear of being dominated by “storage space” in those years?

This also shows from the side that in the years when storage technology was underdeveloped, MP3, which could compress the file size, was like a “black technology” for users at that time.

But after MP3 became popular, controversy also followed. Since MP3 allows anyone to rip CDs, make, copy and distribute music files to anyone, to a certain extent, it can be said that MP3’s dominance of the “global music format” is based on rampant pirated music. . However, from another perspective, these problems that MP3 brings with it are also forcing the music industry to start thinking about legalizing digital music.

What is the origin of the AAC?

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) and MP3 are lossy compressed audio data formats. In 1997, it was jointly developed by Fraunhofer IIS, Dolby Laboratories, AT&T, Sony, and other companies to replace the MP3 format.

AAC is much younger than MP3, and the technology it was born into has far surpassed MP3. According to public information, AAC uses a new algorithm for encoding, which is more efficient and has a higher “cost performance”. As Fraunhofer IIS says, AAC looks better than MP3 in every way.

Although AAC is better than MP3, but MP3’s market share is too high. It is almost impossible for AAC to change the “MP3 inertia” of the user.

Fortunately, not everyone refuses to support AAC. Apple is one of the supporters of AAC. It started to provide AAC format for users to download as soon as possible. Li Chujie, founder of MOZIK music player, said:

In 2006, I bought my first iPod from Apple and it supported AAC files. All MP3 formats that I download from the Internet are converted to AAC files. It was also through this that I noticed the difference in sound quality and byte size between MP3 and AAC.

In the early days, apart from Apple, there were devices like Sony Walkman (NWZ-A, NWZ-S, NWZ-E, NWZ-X series), Nintendo NDSi, and Meizu that supported AAC. Later, as more and more music lovers paid attention to AAC, users gradually recognized its advantages. Both the number and category of hardware devices that support AAC have grown rapidly.

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Mp3 is still the best audio format

Mp3 Audio

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.

Mp3 Patent: goodbye

The MP3 format that revolutionized the music industry is already free as the wind: goodbye to patents

When you download video on the internet sometimes you use AVI or MKV but do you know the differences between them? When you download video on the internet you sometimes use AVI or MKV but do you know the differences between them?

This was the first industry guy to realize that the MP3 they had rejected was killing them. This was the first industry guy to realize that the MP3 they had rejected was killing them.
Services like Spotify already have more customers than digital music buying Services like Spotify already have more customers than digital music buying

The MP3 format revolutionized the world of music. For better or worse, this audio coding format made it possible to listen to (and share) music through the Internet so 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 gave prominence to downloads and streaming.

The technology, however, was subject to patents that were defended by Technicolor, but those patents – still valid for encoders, for example – expired on April 16, 2017 completely. The MP3 is now freer than ever.

Until never, MP3 patents

Those responsible for Fraunhofer IIS explained a few days ago how “on April 23, 2017, the Technicolor mp3 licensing program for certain Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS patents and software related to the mp3 has expired.”

Fraun

In that message, all those who have licensed the technology were thanked for their support of a format that became the “defacto audio codec worldwide over the past two decades,” and highlighted that even with more efficient audio codecs, mp3 is still “very popular with consumers”. The success of MP3 was parallel to that of the legendary Winamp, the player that became that symbol of a change of air in the audio industry.

These patents have been very beneficial for their owners: it is estimated that thanks to them the Fraunhofer Society achieved revenues that reached 100 million euros in 2005. Those amounts of money made many others try to take a piece of that juicy cake, and the lawsuits and lawsuits surrounding who owned what in the MP3 segment have been frequent.

Linux distros, among the big winners

These alternatives still fail to undermine the popularity of the MP3 format, which for the purpose of patent validity can be used without restrictions in all types of scenarios.

Fedora
One of the best known cases was that of Linux distributions, in which we often found ourselves without native reproduction of MP3 content by those patents. In the Fedora documentation, for example, it was indicated how since October 11, 2016 this distribution could already include MP3 players since the patents for music reproduction had expired.

The encoding of MP3 files – creating them from a CD in Fedora, for example – was not “permissible because it requires proprietary technologies and the patent owner has not provided licenses compatible with Fedora requirements.” Neither Technicolor wanted to assign, nor Fedora (or any other distribution) to pay for those licenses.

It was possible to install a posteriori players that provided this option, but the developers of the distributions preferred to be cured in health in this section: now any “distro” may finally include native support for reproduction, but now also for coding.

The alternatives exist, but MP3 does not seem to lose strength

The MP3 format (MPEG-1 Layer 3) has undoubtedly been the “lost” audio format — we lose data in encoding — the most popular in history, but it is certainly not 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 these 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.