The mp3 has been declared dead, but don't worry - the gigabytes of music of dubious legality sitting on your hard drive will still work.
The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, which developed the format, has announced it's giving up licensing the patents required to make mp3s work.
And though it's been reported widely as the "death" of the mp3, it just means Fraunhofer will no longer be demanding fees to use its technology. There's likely to be little money left in it nowadays, with most manufacturers and sites having moved onto newer, better formats.
"The development of mp3 started in the late 1980s at Fraunhofer IIS, based on previous development results at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg," a statement on the group's site reads.
"Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers."
There are various reasons why Fraunhofer's announcement is largely symbolic and will have little to no impact on consumers:
- your old mp3s won't suddenly stop working, and will continue to work as long as manufacturers are willing to support them
- the underlying technology has been patent-free in many jurisdictions for a while now
- there have been legal battles over what Fraunhofer actually owns the rights to
- most legal music stores and websites have moved onto better formats.
"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."
The first public mp3 software was released in 1994, after years of psychoacoustic research in government-funded German labs. For the first time, it became feasible to send music over the fledgling internet, with mp3s about one-tenth the size of the CD-quality songs they were made from.
It took a few years for mp3 to become the default audio standard on the internet, which arguably came with the popularity of illegal downloading site Napster in 1999.
Ironically, Fraunhofer had by then already developed AAC - Advanced Audio Codec - which had much better quality and lower file sizes than mp3s.
iTunes has, since its launch, used AAC. Streaming sites like Spotify tend to use a format called OGG.
High-resolution sites like Tidal use FLAC - they're five times bigger than mp3, but don't lose any of the information in the original music file.
The first mainstream band to sell an mp3 on the internet is widely believed to be Duran Duran, with 1997's 'Electric Barbarella'.
Newshub.
