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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 darkfeline on Friday May 05 2017, @03:47AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Friday May 05 2017, @03:47AM (#504665) Homepage

    If you keep the lossless originals, you can reencode them as lossy compression algorithms improve. Remember how JPEG compression was optimized by 35% a few months ago? If that happens to MP3, I can reencode my music because I still have lossless versions. Sucks to be the guy that only saves MP3.

    You also need lossless versions if you want to mix them. I guess that's not relevant if you're a mindless consumer type.

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