Creators of MP3 Officially Declare it Dead
22 years since it’s creation, the MP3 truly is dead, according to the people who invented it. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a division of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3’s development in the late ’80s, recently announced that its “licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated.”
AAC — or “Advanced Audio Coding is now the de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones. AAC is more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality.
So is it the end of an era? We may still use MP3s, but when the people who spent the better part of a decade creating it say the jig is up, we should probably start paying attention. AAC is indeed much better — it’s the default setting for bringing CDs into iTunes now — and other formats are even better than it, though they also take up mountains of space on our hard drives.
Deezer launched in the U.S. offering “high-resolution” streaming, for double the price of a Spotify account. Tidal did the same. Neil Young tried his hand with the hotly tipped Pono. While all three are not exactly taking over the world — Pono, in fact, is officially dead, rebranded “Xstream” — the record business has put its stamp of approval on the idea, at least. “Master Quality Authenticated” is a promising new technology that uses a type of audio origami to spare cellular data when necessary and to “bloom” in quality when it’s not — though it has drawn pointed criticism for being a closed loop that allows for recording industry cash-ins. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The MP3, as mentioned, enabled millions or billions of song listens, just with incorrect biological assumptions. The lesson seems to be, simply, that our media will always be as exactly imperfect as we are.
For more visit: NPR.org
