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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:05AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:05AM (#504110)

    Pandora uses M4A audio/mp4. I don't listen to Pandora myself. Everyone except me listens to Pandora. Pandora is to streaming music as Xerox is to photocopying.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:06AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:06AM (#504111)

    Amazon Alexa is the new Pandora.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:13AM (#504114)

      Except when I visit small businesses I don't hear shopkeepers asking Alexa to play music for the customers. I do hear ads for Pandora between tracks.

  • (Score: 2) by deimios on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:10AM (2 children)

    by deimios (201) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:10AM (#504192) Journal
    From the Pandora site:

    Pandora is only available in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand right now – but we are working on bringing our music service to other parts of the world

    What are you talking about? 0.5 billion out of 7 billion have access to it. Not even startup level coverage.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:36AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:36AM (#504220)

      It's called exaggeration, but since you insist upon pedantry, Pandora streams songs with English vocals. There are 467,182,551 people who speak English. That's your 0.5 billion right there, and the rest of the world don't want to hear what Pandora offers.

      • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:54AM

        by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:54AM (#504259)

        Hi there, Canadian here.

        We actually *used* to have access to Pandora when it started up, but then ... lawyers.