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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:00AM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:00AM (#504131)

    Opus replaces Vorbis. From Wikipedia: "Opus replaces both Vorbis and Speex for new applications, and several blind listening tests have ranked it higher-quality than any other standard audio format at any given bitrate until transparency is reached, including MP3, AAC, and HE-AAC." FLAC has very large file sizes. Thumb drives aren't that big yet (i.e., my music collection will not fit on a 64GB microSD card or USB drive in FLAC format; when 256GB microSD cards are the norm, this will be different.).

    Why the hell would I care about embedded microcontrollers without MMUs or muliprocessing environments? This isn't the late 90s any more. Anything you're going to be listening to music on these days is going to be running Linux or similar, and will have a CPU more than capable of decoding any audio codec you like. (Android phone - Linux kernel; Car infotainment system - Linux)

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  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:57AM (1 child)

    by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:57AM (#504260)

    Battery life.

    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:39AM

      by Wootery (2341) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:39AM (#506808)

      Is software-decoded audio really a battery drain? Certainly true of video, but, audio?