
“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story - imartin2k
https://marco.org/2017/05/15/mp3-isnt-dead
======
djsumdog
Wait, people thought mp3 was dead because of that announcement?! O_o I feel
like people have lost touch with the history and the entire reason many Linux
distros do not distribute mp3 codecs!

Some of these writers/editors really need to spend each day reading at least
one headline from that day in 2016, 2015 .. all the way back to 1999.

MP3 is now more free/libre, or at least when it comes to encoding/decoding.
Patents are one of the reasons people have been so hesitant about H.264 and
why we see things like WebM.

Personally, I've encoded in FLAC for years, and even in the early days
(2003-ish) I was backing up CDs to oggs instead of mp3s. Unless you're really
concerned about space today, download your music in a lossless format. Sites
like Bandcamp and CDBaby now support lossless (FLAC and ALAC)

~~~
HenryBemis
People (some/many) believe what they read. Some CEOs in some corners of the
planet will rush to their CIO and tell them "I don't know what this mp3 is but
lets switch to aac A-S-A-P!!!". Then the poor CTO (if he/she has a technical
background) will have to take 15mins to explain to the CEO that "mp3 is not
dead, the patent is gone so not it's absolutely free, while for aac we'll have
to be paying ABC amount for our XYZ product/service".

I guess the current aac patent holders are smiling now :)

Confuse & conquer!!!

~~~
pacificmint
The real shame, IMO, is not that some CEO or other non technical person is
confused, but that reputable news outlets reported it that way. (For some
value of reputable).

If you look at the three links that Marco posted in the first sentence, they
lead to articles by Gizmodo, Engadget and NPR, all of which completely got the
story wrong. That's shocking, if you ask me.

~~~
ungzd
Gizmodo and Engadget are not "reputable news outlets", but junk blogs for
users of browser toolbars with announcements for each chinese tablet. I never
seen any half-decent article on such sites. It's even stupidier than
clickbait, there are no sensationalism and attention manipulation, these sites
are just content fillers, their authors just compose words randomly.

~~~
noway421
Is there even a reputable techinical news outlet? TechCrunch is too very
clickbaity and editorilized, although gets linked here all the time

~~~
KozmoNau7
Ars Technica, perhaps?

~~~
rplst8
No. Absolutely not. After they were acquired by Conde Nast, it has been
downhill at an amazing pace.

~~~
cdrark
I have always found Ars to have relevant and well written content. Conde Nast
has a lot of good writers at their various properties.

------
libeclipse
MP3 is really, really​ smart. Like seriously.

Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death.
It should be the opposite! It's now free for everyone and in the public
domain, and that is cause for celebration.

~~~
ygaf
It's a bit surreal. Engadget interprets "becoming patent-free" as "being
retired". Gizmodo interprets it as "it's dead". We're not in a world where
file format fanboys have the writing prowess to hold positions in the media
right?

~~~
josefx
Look for companies with financial interest in locking down media and playback
and patent cartels that want you to pay for their codecs and you will find
your "fanboys". MP3 is now both license and drm free, anyone can write it and
play it anytime and anywhere they want without paying a cent. For some people
that thought is nightmare inducing.

~~~
cr0sh
> For some people that thought is nightmare inducing.

Rhetorical questions...

Who are these people for whom the thought of not making that money causes them
such stress and anguish?

...furthermore, what were they like as children?

------
intoverflow2
Honestly I'm looking forward to Spotify running out of money and shutting down
so this generation will wake up that they need to start duplicating and
archiving their media before they lose it.

Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large
segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because
it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's
servers.

(I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche
that it was 5-10 years ago)

~~~
Bakary
I've gone the opposite route. After years of careful curating my music
library, I started to feel chained to the past, listening to a handful of
tracks over and over. Since music is connected to strong emotions, this would
also bleed into other aspects of my life and cause me to be less forward-
thinking.

I'm fully aware that Spotify and its competitors are deals with the Devil but
if they allow me to feel less burdened, the price is worth it.

It's deeply hypocritical but I also secretly hope that at least a few people
stick to archiving and curating just in case.

~~~
logfromblammo
I trained a NI expert system on the kind of music I like, and turned it loose
on the Internet, where it uses the Amazon wishlist API to make
recommendations.

In other words, I had a kid, played my favorite music to the baby, and can now
mooch off all the wonderful new CDs that show up in the house. All CDs get
ripped and encoded as FLAC for the family media drive, and everyone transcodes
their own lossy files for their own portable devices.

It's kind of an expensive solution, though, and occasionally fails to
recommend music that I like.

~~~
aoeuasdf1
Can you post code for this somewhere?

~~~
logfromblammo
It has been around forever, and sufficiently detailed practical demonstrations
are all over the network--often flagged with the acronym NSFW, which stands
for "Natural Sapience Field Work".~

~~~
Natanael_L
You left out the training system details for the neural network.

~~~
logfromblammo
The NI is loaded into a biomechanical interface that provides sensory inputs,
locomotive actuators, and environmental manipulators. Typically, only one
researcher builds the entire device, and collaboration is not useful for that
part of the project. (Unfortunately, as the network heavily exploits subtle
implementation details in the mechanicals, it is very difficult to perform
upgrades after the first stages of training are completed.)

From there, the researcher has to continually upload conceptual primitives
through the sensory apparatus, and the NI prunes and rebalances its own neural
network to establish basic foundation concepts such as object permanence, the
acceleration of gravity, thermodynamics, ballistic path prediction, etc.
Eventually, when the network is sufficiently trained, researchers may begin to
input additional data through a natural language interface. Due to variations
in the biomechanical devices, it is currently impossible to use standard
bootstrap code to accelerate that process.

In order for the NI to be useful as a music recommendations engine, it is
essential to expose it to music that you already like through its audio
sensors, during the initial training phases. After approximately 8 years, the
NI will begin to autonomously seek out music samples in the wild and recommend
that you purchase copies of promising collections. The system is not perfect.
It will occasionally issue recommendations for music that was already present
in the training corpus, or for maliciously-formed music files designed to hack
uninoculated NIs into recommending them. And it should be noted that these NIs
have been known to abruptly diverge from preferences implied by the training
corpus, producing wildly inaccurate recommendations thereafter.

It's probably just cheaper and more reliable to use an AI, but as long as this
thing still works okay, I'm going to keep refueling it.

------
kazinator
> _AAC makes a lot of sense for low- and medium-quality applications where
> bandwidth is extremely limited or expensive, like phone calls and music-
> streaming services, or as sound for video, for which it’s the most widely
> supported format._

Nope; you can scratch "phone calls" from that list.

AAC (specifically, the AAC-LD variant) is not the best for low bitrate calls;
you want a dedicated voice codec for that application.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC-LD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC-LD)

AAC-LD is only geared toward voice in one parameter: frame size. It's
basically just a "look, AAC can do this too if you want" feature.

Look at the remark there: "It can use a bit rate of 32 - 64kbit/s or higher".
That's a whopping lot. 32 kbps is about the far-out _upper_ bound on bit rate
for using a voice codec. You can get very good call quality at half that.

[http://opus-codec.org/comparison/](http://opus-codec.org/comparison/)

Basically if you look at all the options for compressing speech in telephony,
AAC doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

~~~
phkahler
I thought Opus was technically fine for phone and able to compete on quality.
IIRC it only suffers from lack of use. On paper it seems to be the universal
codec for audio.

~~~
mentalpiracy
Opus is the default voice codec for Discord, and also available as a codec
option for Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers.

Anecdotally, the sound quality is above and beyond what I get on my cell,
without question.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
Don't forget Mumble! Also Slack, apparently.

------
mavhc
MP3 isn't dead, just journalism

~~~
rplst8
This is the truest statement in the whole thread.

~~~
charlesism
Yep. To take "MP3 encoding is now free for anyone to use!" and turn it into
"MP3 is dead!" is one of the worst cases of bad reporting this year.

------
sevensor
MP3 is now as dead as the GIF. Why, I haven't seen a GIF for at least... 15
seconds.

At any rate, (pun intended), I'm perfectly happy with my vorbis files and not
in any hurry to convert to MP3. But I'm glad I don't have to worry about the
silly patent any longer.

------
beedogs
It bugs me that "reputable" news outlets like Fortune Magazine were running
stories which essentially amounted to a Fraunhofer press release with a couple
of paragraphs tacked onto it.

Clearly there's absolutely no effort involved in being a journalist anymore.

~~~
kalleboo
Journalism is dead.

~~~
Bakary
Full length stories and analysis are still very much in demand, but the actual
news communication aspect of the profession is indeed doomed.

------
alsadi
I wrote a similar article in Arabic.

yes, because MP3 is now similar to public domain it does not mean it's dead.
only the business of patent trolls behind it is dead.

[http://g0alkeeper.blogspot.com/2017/05/mp3.html](http://g0alkeeper.blogspot.com/2017/05/mp3.html)

~~~
stannol
The Fraunhofer Society is not and never was a "patent troll". They do actual
research and one of their income sources is licensing the resulting patents.

~~~
nailer
Fraunhofer put the source online without a license at the ISO site, let the
community convince itself that MP3 was a standard and therefore unpatented,
let the community write all the encoders and decoders and surrounding tools
for years, then turned around and asked everyone who made their file format
popular for 10K USD.

~~~
alsadi
Troll is a gentle word, the author of ffmpeg describe patents of software as
"gangsters asking for protection money". All software patents are bad see my
reply above

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.h...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html)

------
pervycreeper
Related: I haven't heard whether popular free software such as Audacity, Linux
distros, etc. will begin including LAME binaries by default as a result of the
patent expiry. Anyone know if such plans exist?

~~~
_ZeD_
well, for one example, have a look at
[http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64](http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64)
\- specifically

    
    
        +--------------------------+
        Sat May 6 23:12:02 UTC 2017
        a/glibc-solibs-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt.
        ap/cdrdao-1.2.3-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
               Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
        ap/sox-14.4.2-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt.
               Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
        d/flex-2.6.4-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
        kde/k3b-2.0.3-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
               Patched to build with ffmpeg3 and gcc7.
        l/ffmpeg-3.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
               Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
        l/glibc-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt.
               Reverted a patch that causes IFUNC errors to be emitted.
        l/glibc-i18n-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt.
        l/glibc-profile-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt.
        l/gst-plugins-base-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
        l/gst-plugins-good-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
        l/gst-plugins-libav-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
        l/gstreamer-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
        l/lame-3.99.5-x86_64-1.txz: Added.
        xap/MPlayer-1.3_20170208-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt.
               Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
        xap/audacious-plugins-3.8.2-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
               Recompiled to support libmp3lame.

------
kozak
A big argument for using lossless instead of lossy are Bluetooth headphones.
When you're listening through them, you're essentially re-encoding one lossy
format into another lossy format, which degrades the quality much more than
each of the formats does by itself.

~~~
mark-r
I simply refuse to use Bluetooth headphones. Problem solved.

------
djmobley
It's not dead, although as storage prices continue to decline, one wonders why
you would still compress audio you care about with a lossy codec.

~~~
adrianN
Because you literally can't tell the difference.

~~~
thirdsun
It's not about audio quality alone, it's about collecting a flawless source.

If you want or need your library in another format at some point you really
should not transcode from a lossy source. You may say that won't ever happen,
but storage is cheap it's very short sighted to risk being locked into one
format. It's not something you could easily fix later.

~~~
adrianN
It might be short-sighted if the format doesn't have excellent open source
decoders. MP3 won't die ever, because of LAME.

~~~
eikenberry
But you can covert to whatever lossless format you need without worry.
Lossless to lossless conversion is possible an infinite number of times
(theoretically), vs lossy to lossy you get maybe a couple for free.

~~~
icebraining
As long as you keep the MP3s around, converting to any format for the 100th
time is no lossier than the first time. What you need to avoid are chains of
lossy formats.

~~~
TillE
Once upon a time I converted 320kbps MP3s of Dark Side of the Moon to 320kbps
OGGs. It ruined a certain cymbal sound.

Never convert between lossy formats, not even once.

------
lholden
MP3 has been "dead" to me ever since the non patent encumbered formats started
becoming popular. Mind you, I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS
since the mid 90s... So I have a vested interest in open formats.

These days, all my music is in a lossless format anyway. Especially now that
my phone has enough storage space for it.

Anyhow. I'd say that if anything... The patents expiring way the heck sooner
would have been healthy for the format.

------
theandrewbailey
I think the contrary, I can see MP3 getting even more popular now that it has
no patents.

------
hannob
Not sure how the author comes to the conclusion that opus isn't widely
supported.

Opus is supported in all major webbrowsers and natively in modern Android
systems. I'd call that widely supported.

~~~
Yaggo
> Opus is supported in all major webbrowsers and natively in modern Android
> systems. I'd call that widely supported.

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus](http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus)

Not supported in Safari. I guess the reason is that iOS devices don't have
hardware encoder for it and Apple doesn't want to compromise battery life
(maybe marginal issue with audio, but big issue with webm).

~~~
jhasse
> I guess the reason is that iOS devices don't have hardware encoder for it
> and Apple doesn't want to compromise battery life (maybe marginal issue with
> audio, but big issue with webm).

I rather think that Apple doesn't like the idea of royalty-free codecs which
would make it easier for free operation systems to support multimedia on the
web. AAC helps to keep you locked into macOS or Windows, because it works out-
of-the-box there (in contrast to Linux distributions like Fedora).

~~~
brainfire
On the other hand, the only audio format I'm aware of Apple inventing in the
last 20 years is royalty-free and available under the Apache license.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless)

~~~
jhasse
It wasn't royalty-free from the beginning, in contrast to FLAC. Guess which
browsers don't support FLAC:
[http://caniuse.com/#search=flac](http://caniuse.com/#search=flac)

------
ksec
AAC was introduced in 1997, does any one know when will its patents expire as
well?

And we haven't had any improvement in Audio compression since then. MP3 - AAC
and That is it. All the others are at best AAC similar quality / bitrate.

At 256Kbps, the majority couldn't hear a difference between MP3 and AAC. At
128Kbps it is only slightly better.

We dont have anything like HEVC which is an order of magnitude better then,
say MPEG-2 at low bitrate.

------
LeoNatan25
Disagree with the author on the technical merits that AAC only sounds
marginally better than MP3 at 128kbps and higher. For certain audio shapes,
MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some extent JPEG for some image
shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results due to different compression
mechanics. Much like MPEG4 ASP and MPEG4 AVC and HEVC produce different
compression artifacts, with ASP having much worse artifacts.

~~~
pizza234
> For certain audio shapes, MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some
> extent JPEG for some image shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results
> due to different compression mechanics.

Do you base this assertion on blind testing? I'd really like to know how much
of the people that says "MP3 sounds X/Y/Z" actually did one (actually, I'd
like all of them to _actually do one_ ), because in the blind tests I've
participated/seen participating, with a modern encoder and mid/high bitrate
(in the average range of 192/224 kbits) users were systematically not able to
hear any difference.

Of course I found some exceptions; for example, a friend of mine had good
hearing on high frequencies, therefore, he could immediately spot 128 kbps CBR
mp3s which have a lowpass threshold at ~16 khz.

~~~
LeoNatan25
I think I fall within that latter category. I have done tests myself, in an
environment I feel relaxed in and comfortable, and have been able to hear the
difference. I also hear the difference going a step above, with lossless.

------
sitkack
You know what needs to be resurrected? MPEG1 Video Codec. It scales to 4k x 4k
and very soon to be patent free.

~~~
toyg
There is a bunch of early-internet tech that will soon get out of patent
locks, it could lead to a new Golden Age.

------
shmerl
Well, it's not not patent incumbered, but there is no need to use it for
anything besides playback of existing legacy media that doesn't have a
lossless original. Otherwise just use Opus for playback purposes.

------
S_A_P
As a former cakewalk software user it used to piss me off royally that I had
to pay for the MP3 license to unlock the feature. It was a trivial amount
(19bucks?) and I understand why they thought it was a good idea(their way of
sticking it to Fraunhofer, and a ridiculous fee) but it ended up feeling like
the customer that just spent 500 bucks on software was the one getting screwed
especially considering how much cross licensing cakewalk did/does.

------
darklajid
Tangentially related: Being out of touch with the podcast scene for quite a
while I was interested to follow the 'Overcast' link. Unfortunately that
turned out to be for platforms I don't own.

If there are some passionate podcast listeners here,

1) do you have recommendations for an alternative to Overcast (ideally cross-
platform, Android/Linux required, Windows desirable)?

2) can you recommend HN related (overlapping with the content here) podcasts?

~~~
QuicksilverJohn
1)
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod)

------
Millennium
I'm looking at the Tunequest list at [http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-
mp3-patents/20070226/](http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-
mp3-patents/20070226/), and it looks to me like patents #5,924,060 and
#5,703,999 (the last two listed) shouldn't expire for a few months yet. Is
that list mistaken?

------
ytch
AAC was released in 1997, why they start to advocate AAC after MP3's patent is
expired?

I thought they state "MP3 is dead" just because its patent is expired, while
AAC isn't:

[http://www.via-corp.com/us/en/licensing/aac/licensefees.html](http://www.via-
corp.com/us/en/licensing/aac/licensefees.html)

------
smaili
Long live the MIDI!

------
Markoff
TIL MP3 is only one year younger than JPEG, or considering i was using JPEG
daily years before MP3 took off, I remember Winamp version 1

------
zecg
Finally, LAME can become LIME.

------
jjawssd
Can the Opus codec be emulated with asmjs in Safari or iOS?

~~~
derf_
You may be interested in the following project from the Wikimedia Foundation:

[https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/](https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/)

------
Nano2rad
Frauhofer announcement did not mention expiry of patents.

------
tibu
[http://mp3.isdead.fyi/](http://mp3.isdead.fyi/)

------
isk517
So many people here do not want to face the reality that MP3 is dead. I know,
my dad who worked in the MP3 factory for 20 years was laid off last week just
after the last MP3 came off the assembly line. I suspect the more
entrepreneurial amongst you here may want to start scouring peoples Recycling
Bins for old MP3s that you can break down into replacement parts to sell to
collectors.

~~~
globuous
By mp3, do you mean .mp3, the audio file format, or an mp3 player ? Because
the way I understand it, the article talks about the file format, not the
hardware.

~~~
joehart42
_Whoosh_

------
Qwertious
It's odd how this has hit the frontpage, but hasn't had a single comment on it
yet.

~~~
superflyguy
It's just your typical blog; not saying anything very new or interesting.

~~~
Qwertious
And yet it's on the frontpage. Like I said: odd.

------
lloeki
> AAC and other newer audio codecs can produce better quality than MP3, but
> the difference is only significant at low bitrates. At about 128 kbps or
> greater, the differences between MP3 and other codecs are very unlikely to
> be noticed, so it isn’t meaningfully better for personal music collections.

This is patently false unless you listen on bad audio gear (bad DAC, bad
cans).

I don't even have serious equipment (MBP+iPhone so guess about the DAC, as for
headphones: AKG k514 mkII, Sennheiser Momentum (over ear), SoundMagic E10
(intra), Marshall Monitor (not mine), BeyerDynamic DT 770 250Ω (not mine)) and
the difference is downright _obvious_ going from 128k to 256k almost whatever
the place and definitely _noticeable_ on select features from 256k to 320k.

Some corner-case audio patterns are just known to make MP3 encoders choke
whatever the bitrate (a higher bitrate merely mitigates the problem for MP3),
while they pass with flying colours on AAC. Sadly those corner cases are not
just theoretical and have a real effect for some songs. At 320k though it
won't make the song any less enjoyable (which is another metric entirely) but
it can definitely be noticed (which is what the article claims).

~~~
Fnoord
> This is patently false unless you listen on bad audio gear (bad DAC, bad
> cans).

Double blind tests suggest this is true for somewhere between 128 kbit and 256
kbit (256 kbit is CD quality, while 192 kbit is near CD quality, and the
difference between 128 kbit and 192 kbit is miles compared to 192 kbit and 256
kbit; hence I suggest 192+ kbit. However, its 2017 and 320 kbit or lossless
isn't a huge issue anymore; its even OK over 4G). Also, my quote is from 2000;
ever since we swapped to LAME and ABR > VBR > CBR; ABR isn't even a static
(constant) bitrate.

Quoting r3mix.net from 2000:

Facts:

128 kbit/s is not cd quality

256 kbit/s is cd quality (x) (in case of Lame or some Fraunhofer, not Xing)

In february 2000 c't magazin organised a blind listening test. 300 Audiophiles
were involved, finalists tested 17 1-min clips from different artists (classic
and pop):

original CD recording

128 Kbit/s Joint Stereo [MusicMatch (FhG) v4.4] encoded PC decoded Mac

256 Kbit/s Joint Stereo [MusicMatch (FhG) v4.4] encoded PC decoded Mac

all on cdrs and played in a Recording Studio on:

B&W Nautilus 803, Marantz CD14 with amp PM14 (Straightwire Pro cabling and
extra's) [DM30000- so bit more than $15000]

Sennheiser Orpheus Electrostatic Reference-headphones with tweaked
accompanying amp (digital and analog out) [>$10000]

Conclusions:

90% of the 128 Kbit material was picked out

MP3@256 was rated to have the same music quality as cd!

If you find MP3@256 to be of inferior quality compared to the original cd,
you're very likely to be doing something wrong with the test (correct decoder,
no objective double blind testing, DSP filters distorting the process, ...)
Maybe this is something for you. You can always read the article in the german
c't 6/2000 on p92.

The treshold of mp3 transparency lies somewhere between 128kbit/s and
256kbit/s, depending on the kind of music and your hearing and equipment.

~~~
lightedman
"If you find MP3@256 to be of inferior quality compared to the original cd,
you're very likely to be doing something wrong with the test"

Try running that 256kbit MP3 through a pitch shifter. The quality loss becomes
very apparent very quickly.

~~~
jrimbault
"Try playing a random binary blob as a video file, it might play, it might
not"

Mp3 is a _clever_ compression algorithm made for consumption. It isn't
intended to be pitch shifted...

~~~
lightedman
FLAC claims to be lossless/archival yet the same artifacting appears when
pitch-shifted.

