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?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:17AM (3 children)
You sure about that? Because according to Opus developers themselves, beyond 128 Kbps there's almost no difference between codecs so an MP3 at 192Kbps should be indistinguishable from the original. See this graph [opus-codec.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:38PM
Well, as always it depends on the quality of the encoder. "192 kbit/s" simply refers to file size, and is not a measure of encoding quality. A bad encoder can certainly produce poor-sounding results that take up lots of space.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Thursday May 04 2017, @08:02PM
That's for typical non-"degenerate" passages rather than hard to encode pieces. Unfortunately, for MP3 a lot of cases it can't handle pop up in normal usage.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 05 2017, @12:18AM
Jean-Michel Jarre have some music that won't encode right using mp3 joint-stereo at anything below 256 kbit/s. I think the Chronologie album is one of them. (no 4?)