What audio formats govern in 2019?
At the end of last month, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, a German organization specializing in the development of applications and technologies, announced that the Technicolor mp3 licensing program “for certain related mp3 patents and Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS software has been finished”. In other words: the creator of the audio format that ruled the world at the end of the nineties and the beginning of the new century gave him, with these words, the last nail to the coffin of the mp3.
“We thank all our licensees for their great support in converting mp3 into the defacto audio format in the world, during the last two decades.”
The IIS recognizes that although there are currently more efficient audio codecs with advanced features, the mp3 is still very popular. However, most video and audio streaming services use “modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3 ”.
The format was the protagonist of the change of the business model of the music industry, when digital technologies and the Internet began to facilitate the sharing of music. Buying a CD and compressing it in mp3 format to store the music on other media (recordable CDs, basically) and thus starting a process of hand-to-hand transmission of albums and discographies became daily bread (access to broadband and email capabilities at the end of the last century complicated making this diffusion through virtual media).
The AAC or Advanced Audio Coding is the format used in applications and services such as Apple Music and is capable of providing high quality audio without requiring large amounts of information. This algorithm exploits two strategies for this: it discards from the audio what is not perceptible to the human ear and eliminates the redundant signals in the coding (remember that this, like the mp3 and other streaming formats is a method of music compression, therefore it constitutes an interpretation of an audio originally edited in formats such as FLAC or Free Lossless Audio Codec, another digital compression format that, unlike its other pairs, does not register any loss in the quality of the compressed audio).
However, Spotify, the paid streaming service that reigns in the world with 100 million subscribers (although Soundcloud has a total of 175 million users), uses another format, the Ogg Vorbis (OGG), which in premium quality grants audios to 320 kbps (in the desktop version of the application, because in its mobile version they only reach half the quality).
Deezer, a competitor of Spotify, on the other hand, offers an Elite service, with audio streaming in FLAC format (16-bit, at 1,411 kbps) at twice the premium subscription of its rival.
As you can imagine, at better quality, larger files, mass consumption of memory and storage. Perhaps this was not the strength of the mp3: to offer a decent audio format, depending on the codec and the player, without requiring the use of too much information (although the flatness of its compression and the metallization of the organic sounds that the conversion to mp3 meant I had nothing lovely about it). Anyway, today is official: the king is dead, long live the king.
