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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the stand-by-for-podcast dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0245

Back in 2015, Personal Audio's claimed patent was invalidated by a federal court.

Podcasters, you can now engage in your lengthy Maron opens without the feeling of being legally targeted by a Texas company that many would consider to be a patent troll.

On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case of Personal Audio v. Electronic Frontier Foundation. In short, the case is all said and done.

As Ars reported in August 2017, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the April 2015 inter partes review (IPR) ruling—a process that allows anyone to challenge a patent's validity at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/podcasting-patent-case-is-finally-totally-and-completely-dead-now/


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:16AM (5 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:16AM (#680320) Homepage Journal

    Because MP3 is "good enough".

    I have some in FLAC but I can't play them in iTunes so I use VLC. While I could in principle play them on my iPhone, the user reviews at the App Store clearly state that every last iOS FLAC player sucks rocks.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:30AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:30AM (#680321)

    As an Apple user, you should be using Apple Lossless or AAC.

    MP3 is "good enough" if you're listening in a car or other noisy environment, and don't care about file size. AAC and Opus get the same crappy quality at about half the size.

    I still use CDs. I tried to encode one to MP3, and the very first electric guitar note got so distorted that it was unbearable on anything below 320Kbit (highest quality). At 320Kbit, it merely sounds like something that can be recognized as an electric guitar.

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:36AM (2 children)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:36AM (#680323) Homepage Journal

      To listen to 192 tracks for a few hours makes me feel very weary.

      That doesn't happen with 320.

      However I will say that I can tell the difference between 320 and FLAC when I use reasonably decent speakers and my crypto mining rig is powered off. When the rig is operating I can't hear the difference.

      Apple Lossless wouldn't fit even on my 256 GB iPhone 7. Even with MP3, at 320 I barely have enough storage.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 16 2018, @03:55PM (1 child)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 16 2018, @03:55PM (#680421)

        makes me feel very weary

        That is interesting in that most psychoacoustic research I'm familiar with for voice and music codecs has always been based on very short term A/B testing or listening comprehension style intelligibility surveys. I'm not immediately aware of any codec design work done for long term listener fatigue and I could certainly predict that weird IMD distortion would eventually result in long term listener fatigue.

        Keeping it on topic, you should run out and patent that business method, LOL. Something like extend the concept of short term A/B testing to an analysis of listener fatigue after six hours of exposure.

        I'm familiar with "proof" or at least lame studies that most humans can't A/B 192 vs 320 given bug free codecs and typical music, of course thats also proves its not good enough for everyone, only for most, and it seems quite possible the varying low level distortion causes varying levels of listener fatigue.

        Probably real academic research exists on the topic, but a quickie google mostly finds audiophile stuff of the "green market" and "oxygen free copper" variety.

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:30AM

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:30AM (#680572) Journal

    More properly, because FLAC is too big and aac is too patented. I predict we'll see a lot of MP3 until the patents on AAC expire. Then we'll see lots of AAC.