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MP3 is really, really smart. Like seriously. Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death. It should be the opposite! It's now
by libeclipse 9y ago
MP3 is really, really smart. Like seriously.
Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death. It should be the opposite! It's now free for everyone and in the public domain, and that is cause for celebration.
- ygaf 9y agoIt's a bit surreal. Engadget interprets "becoming patent-free" as "being retired". Gizmodo interprets it as "it's dead". We're not in a world where file format fanboys have the writing prowess to hold positions in the media right?
- Santosh83 9y agoNot at all surreal when you keep in mind that the world turns on money. From that point of view MP3 is indeed dead.
- the8472 9y agoDepends on whose money. For anyone who does not profit from those patents (>99.99% of the world) they'll save licence fees, which would mean more money for them.
- ygaf 9y agoI think his implication is that patentholders encourage the support/use of the format, abstract as it is (a concrete example being PC vendors obliged to sell windows machines only).
- ygaf 9y agoI see your point, but like the author I think mp3 has plenty of inertia even from this point in time. Even if I overestimate mp3 usage nowadays, those other journos are getting ahead of themselves.
- omginternets 9y agoBetcha it generated a lot of clicks.
- usrusr 9y agoIf the value of click-inducing wrongness wasn't such a well-understood force one would have to wonder how exactly all those writers were incentivized by owners of not-yet-free formats. As it stands though, we just get to apply Occham: in online news media, A/Bing truth vs lies for clicks has a clear winner.
- MagnumOpus 9y agoWe are in a word where success as a write is churning out 2 fluff pieces of click bait rather than one research article. The writers at all the AOL and Gawker franchises are the end result of this trend - a million monkeys sitting at typewriters.
- daemin 9y agoThe did the classic lazy news thing of publishing a press release and with a new title. Nothing more than low value news filler.
- acdha 9y agoThis seems like a natural if pathological outgrowth of tech culture obsessed with newness. When a 3 year old phone is described as ancient, obsolete, or out of support for two years, how good could a 2 decade old compression system be?
- discreditable 9y agoModern compression schemes are better, but for most people the difference is academic.
- acdha 9y agoNo argument: I even have a (very few) recordings where pre-echo is noticeable but I think we're prone to over-estimating things like that versus universal support.
- Bakary 9y agoIt's so ancient that it makes you assume that it has to be truly exceptional to survive that long in such an environment.
- acdha 9y agoExceptional might be the wrong term but I think there's a plateau effect: MP3 was the first mainstream codec to reach the level where most people didn't perceive any drawbacks and there's a huge inertial benefit. I don't regret ripping my entire collection as AAC / lossless but I also acknowledge that the space savings are basically a waste of time for anyone not using good speakers / headphones in a very quiet environment, and outside of a handful of pieces susceptible to pre-echo lossless was a hedge against double-encoding in the somewhat unlikely event that the future codec landscape changes dramatically.
- Frqy3 9y agoThis is a symptom of PR copy paste article writing.
- qb45 9y agoExactly, they are all variations on Fraunhofer's termination announcement which of course recommends modern replacements instead of telling customers to use MP3 for free.
- josefx 9y agoLook for companies with financial interest in locking down media and playback and patent cartels that want you to pay for their codecs and you will find your "fanboys". MP3 is now both license and drm free, anyone can write it and play it anytime and anywhere they want without paying a cent. For some people that thought is nightmare inducing.
- jshevek 9y agoGizmodo has a history, in recent years, of this kind of ignorance. Something has changed in their hiring practices, it seems.
- metaphorm 9y agotech "journalists" write about things they understand poorly. I'd love to have more insight into where the groupthink on this comes from though. maybe they're more familiar with covering other industries where an expired patent might mean that a pharma company would cease production of their brand name pill (and let generics sell it at lower margins instead)?
- nebabyte 9y ago> MP3 is really, really smart. Like seriously. How so/any links or search terms for the aspects you're impressed by?
- libeclipse 9y agoWas really blown away by [0], a description of the Fourier transform. And also [1] is a good read. [0] http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-homer-simpsons-face http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-h... [1] http://ww.w.mpgedit.org/mpgedit/mp3.pdf http://ww.w.mpgedit.org/mpgedit/mp3.pdf
- poizan42 9y agoIt's second nature to anyone with knowledge of signal processing. Sure Fourier transforms are very useful, but let's not be led to think that there was anything novel in the design of the MP3 format.
- auxym 9y agoLet's also not forget that the orignal Frauhofer encoder was not exactly impressive in it's results. Anyone remember downloading 128k CBR files off napster, the warbled mess that was? A lot of the advances came from the psycho-acoustic modeling and VBR algorithms from the LAME devs.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI remember having to download LAME binaries from South America, as recently as last month, and as long ago as 1999. And I also remember when it was just a patch to Fraunhofer's reference implementation, under a suspiciously shaky interpretation of the law. I remember doing a comparison test way back in the late 90s between an officially licensed MP3 encoder and LAME on the same set of music WAV files, and was simply blown away when I could actually hear a difference in the results. Being the sort of anti-audiophile that I am, I then reduced the bitrate of the LAME encoding until I could just barely tell that it was too low, so that I could cram more music onto my hard drive, make playlists, and record them at 1x speed through the line-out port to an audio cassette tape, for my car stereo. At the time, LAME made the smallest file sizes for the crap music quality that I tolerate. Nowadays, I encode at minimum of 96k/sec (sometimes better) just to annoy other people around me less, and to cut down on the suggestions that I get some real speakers for my phone. It ain't the speaker, folks; that's pretty much the best quality I can discern with my own ears. When it comes to music, I think people pay far too much attention to audiophile opinions, and perhaps not enough to those who have physiological limitations on their enjoyment of music and/or recognition of speech-frequency sounds. But yeah, even I could tell when someone used a crappy encoder on their MP3 files. That's why I always ripped my own CDs, or specifically sought out lossless-encoded files, so that I could then use LAME to get an acceptable and consistent level of crappiness. Even now, I only download FLAC, and transcode my own MP3s for portable devices.
- pieter_mj 9y agothe real story is why several techblogs spun the expiration of a patent to be the death of the mp3 format. Clickbaity publishing out of control (has it ever been in control?).