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The MP3 Format is now Patent Free

posted by martyb on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the lets-party-like-its-1999 dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 04 2017, @08:20AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday May 04 2017, @08:20AM (#504238) Journal

    Microsoft tried to kill all other lossy compression methods for music. They couldn't destroy mp3 because it was too well known, but they had much better luck killing Ogg Vorbis. That's why it's crazy hard to find a music player in the US that supports Ogg Vorbis. Car radios also tend not to support Ogg Vorbis. You'll have better luck in Europe. But there are several ways around MS's attempt to ban all formats other than WMA/WMV.

    Get a music player that can run Rockbox. https://www.Rockbox.org [rockbox.org] . It's not too difficult to install.

    Another way is to buy a player that is sold in both Europe and America. Then, flash the device you bought in America with the European ROM. That worked for the Samsung Yepp.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:51AM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:51AM (#504258)

    Very much second RockBox if you have an old MP3 player around that you still use. I have a couple of SanDisk players around that I use for exercising, etc, and RockBox not only adds support for more formats, better EQ options, ReplayGain, etc, but also reduces the startup time with a large from minutes to pretty much instantaneous. I think it's very cool that SanDisk also plays nice with RockBox. Of course, pretty much everyone uses smartphones now, but there are still spots where it's handy to have one of these tiny players.