The Creators of the MP3 Format Say It Is Officially Dead

Damn man, so this is where we’re at now in the digital world. We’re at a point where the creators of the format have officially sealed the casket for the MP3 and buried it.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a German research institution funded by their government, and created the MP3 back in the 1980’s, has terminated the licensing program after decades.

“The development of mp3 started in the late 80s at Fraunhofer IIS, based on previous development results at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3.”

Obviously, they’re plugging the AAC format (which they created as well, and is the file type that iTunes uses), so they’re not completely out of business. But this is an eye opener for a previous generation of fans who consume music. The digital age and streaming services have officially taken over and they’re not going away any time soon.

Whether FLAC, AAC or MQA sticks around remains to be seen, but higher quality listening for less cellular data used or lower megabytes is the new goal for these companies.

Pour out a little bandwidth for the MP3. It will live forever through our hard drives.

[Source]

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