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MP3 decoding was already free and got recently included in Fedora. But now, encoding is also free according to Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS: "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." The Wikipedia MP3 article confirms that.
So, do you still use an MP3 library or have you switched to another format or means of listening to music such as (spying built-in) streaming services?
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The MP3 Format is now Patent Free
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:03AM (10 children)
Basically every album I've acquired in the past 5 years has come from one of two places: Amazon or Bandcamp. The bandcamp stuff sometimes has a nice variety of formats, though I usually do 320kbps MP3. Amazon just gives me an MP3, probably 192kbps but I don't think I've ever even checked.
I've got a couple oggs in my collection, they mix right in with the MP3s, but there's not many of 'em. MP3 has always been the least common denominator, and at this point what the hell am I gonna do, take MP3s that I'm getting from other sites and convert them to a FLAC? What would be the point? I look at purchasing a CD the same way I look at buying a poster or a T-Shirt. It's nice to support the band with a physical product, but I'm not gonna listen to the damn thing. I actually might listen to a vinyl, but not a CD. The CD is just to support the band while I go download the copy I'm actually gonna listen to. If I like the band enough I'll buy that album three times -- a vinyl that hangs on the wall and gets played occasionally as an experience, a CD that mostly just sits on the shelf, and a download that actually gets played. Fuck, I really need to stop buying CDs...
I spent a long time pirating a lot of music, but sometime around college I realized it was becoming easier to buy the stuff legally than to pirate it, and it was cheap enough that it was worth paying twice even just to avoid the hassle of ripping a CD. Not that I even bother buying the CDs unless I just feel like giving money away...but even if I've already got the CD, I'd rather re-buy the album than go find it. It's probably gonna be all scratched up anyway...
That's not to say that I want my music "in the cloud" though. I love Amazon/Bandcamp downloads, because I can download to my PC, I can download to my phone, and I can then do whatever I want with that MP3. If I lose my collection, I can always re-download those tracks. If Amazon goes dark, I still have my music. Best of both worlds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:15AM (1 child)
I spent a long time pirating a lot of music, but sometime around college I realized it was becoming easier to buy the stuff legally than to pirate it
Radical, dude. Have you noticed how having money inclines you toward spending money? It's uncanny how that happens. Since I'm a temporarily embarrassed billionaire at the moment, I'm not even paying the internet bill to post this comment. I figure I'll start paying for internet again right around the same time as I start paying taxes again, when Trumpland becomes great for me.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday May 05 2017, @07:20PM
Well, that's certainly part of it, but the death of DRM in music was around the same time, along with price cuts in the average cost of an album. I'm sure as shit not buying files that will only play on one device or that require an internet connection to validate no matter what the price is. I'm not gonna pay for a streaming service where I still have to deal with "BUFFERING..." trying to listen in my car and re-purchasing the same songs every single month. I'm not gonna pay twenty bucks to download a few megabytes. But when I started to see *reasonable* offers, I took them.
These are the same reasons I don't often buy or go to theaters to see movies. It's not worth the price for something two hours long that I'll only ever watch once, and even if the content was worth the price it's rendered nearly worthless with DRM and other restrictions. I could afford to go to the theater a few times a week if I wanted to; I've actually gone twice in the past five years. I could afford to buy or rent a DVD whenever I want, but I honestly don't think I've ever done that in my life. I can probably afford to watch as many movies as I want, but instead I watch hours and hours of YouTube because it's easier to get and it's generally got higher quality content anyway. Doesn't matter how much money you've got if the products they're producing just aren't worth buying.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Roger Murdock on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:26AM (5 children)
sometime around college I realized it was becoming easier to buy the stuff legally than to pirate it
Usually around once per day I read something on the internet that makes me feel old. Today this is it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:43AM (3 children)
I stopped buying movie tickets when I finally got tired of the same old routine of walking to the same old theater, buying the same old bag of popcorn, and listening to the young people talk through the movie. I was getting older every year but the young people were always the same age. Now I stay home and pirate everything instead. It helps that I have no friends which explains my complete lack of peer pressure to stop watching movies targeted at millennials. Also I only listen to all of today's teen music. I'm sure my own cohort considers me a traitor, but I don't talk to people so I don't care.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:58AM (2 children)
I'd like to buy the rights to your life story to write a script for a major motion picture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:48AM (1 child)
Thank you for not pirating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @07:01AM
OK, we will take that as a go ahead to publish the whole thing, with your permission, whoever you are. My God Copyright Holders are such push-overs! "You will give me credit?" "Well, it is your work." OK, whore me to the extent the even some dweed in San Diego will know who I am! "Are you willing to show him your armpits? That seems to be the thing for him. No actual physical contact necessary. Seriously.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday May 05 2017, @02:41AM
I tell ya, kids these days. Back in the day you couldn't buy music online even if you wanted to, downloading a new song took considerably longer than it took to play it. Oh, and playing a MP3 slammed my Cyrix 6x86 with it's weak-sauce FPU so hard you really couldn't do anything else while listening to your newly pirated MP3.
A bit later we got MP3.com and I got a K6 and life was much better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:52AM (1 child)
I spent a long time pirating a lot of music, but sometime around college I realized it was becoming easier to buy the stuff legally than to pirate it,
I wish it was that easy with ebooks... I have an ebook-reder which displays e-pub format. It's a book to me, so I won't connect it to WLan, I won't let it submit any statistic about my reading-habits, list of books stored on my reader or spy on me in any other way.
Now I wanted to buy an ebook (the InterWorld novels from Neil Gaiman). It was available as e-pub in several book-stores, after registration, but always DRM-crippled, and therefore required Adobe reader (not available for Linux) or a smartphone reader app or a registered e-book, usually with wifi access. The app doesn't help me, since I don't want to read a whole book on anything but e-paper.
I do have a Windows VM for some work-related occasions, and I know that there is some way to use Acrobat reader there, afterwards open the book in Calibre, export it, convert it to epub, and finally put it on the reader. But that is out of question, because once I bought the book there is no guarantee that this process will still work with latest Adobe reader and latest encrypted ebook, and I assume not way to return the book if the process doesn't work.
Seriously: Searching for a downloadable, unencrypted version [that is, pirated] usually takes about half an hour, sometimes longer, of suffering terribly bad ads, attack attempts from rouge websites and such. I can't do that at work in my lunch break due to the enourmeous legal risk, I wouldn't do this on my phone since I consider phones inherently person-bound (as in, at least Google knows exactly who did what). Therefore I'd have to start my laptop at home and waste my precous leasure-time. I'd equal that effort to $15, absolute minimum, probably doubling or trippling this would be fair. So, even without any moral consideration it would be an obvious choice to buy it for $7,99 instead within 5 minutes, especially since buying it in a well-sorted online catalogue would be a pleasure, probably enticing me to buy a couple of more books.
From a moral point of view I'd also be very willing to pay for the book. I know that some authors earn really big, knowledge should be free and all that, but entertainment is not knowledge, and while I support demands for drastically shortened copyright periods, I don't see a problem in entertainment costing money, and I'm pretty sure I'd still buy the newest sequel of a good book instead of waiting even 5 years for the copyright to expire.
I really wonder if the book-industry will ever catch up with the music industry, and understand that they will sell much more if they skip this DRM bullshit and just sell their books.
On topic: Yes, I also buy mp3. Usually at Amazon, occasionally elsewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:27PM
The music industry is run by some of the sharpest businessmen around, and yet even they got played for fools by Steve Jobs when he negotiated rights for the iTunes Music Store. He was an awful human being, but he is also the sole reason why music and (only music! no other media) was available DRM-free for a while.
You can be damn sure that the other media industries took note, and are never going to allow un-DRMed distribution channels to gain a foothold ever again.