The developers of the most popular music compression format MP3 have officially announced its demise.
The Fraunhofer Institute, the German company that was one of the main driving forces behind the development of the MP3, has released a statement that the licensing for patents and software relating to the MP3 have been terminated.
MP3 has been around since the 1980s and was one of the main driving forces behind a revolution in the way that people listened to music.
Don’t worry –you’ll still be able to listen to music on the move, it’s just that the tired format is being put out to pasture.
The cons against mp3 was that the quality of music is greatly affected by being converted into MP3 especially as better codecs are being developed
The fact that the name MP3 is so well known is a testament to the effect that the format has had on the music industry. Without the MP3 there would have been no ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’, the tagline for the iPod launched back in 2001.
In the official statement from the Fraunhofer Institute shared by NPR, and an official spokesman said:
The Fraunhofer Institute, the German company that was one of the main driving forces behind the development of the MP3, has released a statement that the licensing for patents and software relating to the MP3 have been terminated.
MP3 has been around since the 1980s and was one of the main driving forces behind a revolution in the way that people listened to music.
Don’t worry –you’ll still be able to listen to music on the move, it’s just that the tired format is being put out to pasture.
The cons against mp3 was that the quality of music is greatly affected by being converted into MP3 especially as better codecs are being developed
The fact that the name MP3 is so well known is a testament to the effect that the format has had on the music industry. Without the MP3 there would have been no ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’, the tagline for the iPod launched back in 2001.
The Future
The MP3 has in recent times been solidly overtaken by another format, the Advanced Audio Codec family, commonly referred to as AAC which offers better quality and compression ratio.
“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”.Defunct music formats are an interesting proposition; vinyl, CD and even MiniDisk still have loyal followers around the world. While MP3 is undoubtedly going to join the hall of fame in the history of music, the likelihood of music aficionados hanging on to the format is low as the quality of music is greatly affected by being converted into MP3.
