Medieval Europeans believed that the divine right of sovereignty transferred instantly from one monarch to the next upon the death of the previous one. This led to a saying, first used in 1422 in France, that translates to “The king is dead. Long live the king!” And in that same spirit, when the last patent related to the MP3 file format expired April 16, 2017, a few people said MP3 is dead, long live Mp3. And some skipped the part about MP3 living long, and just declared it dead.
Was MP3 dead really?
On April 17, 2017, the last MP3-related patent, US Patent #: 6,009,399 regarding bit rate encoding and held by Deutsche Thomson Brandt GmbH, expired. Curiously, when the event was reported at all, the headline typically was that MP3 was dead. That’s partly because Fraunhofer Institute deceptively announced right around the same time that they were canceling the MP3 licensing program. They conveniently forgot to mention they were canceling it because there was no need to pay royalties for it anymore, and they wanted to license another file format, still protected by patent and subject to royalties, instead.
MP3 had a good run, first emerging around 1996 and becoming more common as CPU speeds increased, making it more practical to rip and encode your own files.
How MP3 hides in plain sight
The other question news stories kept bringing up was whether anyone cares about MP3 anymore. It does really seem like no one talks about MP3 anymore, but that doesn’t mean nobody uses it. Sure, people stream their music instead of buying MP3s and storing them locally, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use MP3. Many, if not all of the streaming services are sending MP3 data when you are listening. The difference is your playback device doesn’t store it.
That’s part of the reason why countless hardware and software still understands MP3. We still use it all the time. MP3 is still everywhere, we just don’t have to think about it anymore.
I find it strange that so few people noticed the last MP3-related patent expired, and some open source software still doesn’t support MP3 by default because of patent reasons, even though those patents expired nearly a decade ago now. Unlike GIF, the open source community continued shunning MP3. After all of the legal fighting around Napster, the Diamond Rio, MP3.com, and anything else related to MP3 around the turn of the century, it seems like the file format faded away with a whimper.
Whenever I talk to someone 20 or 30 years younger than me about music and I dig through CDs, tapes, and MP3s looking for ideas, it makes me feel like a dinosaur. Physical media is making something of a comeback, and flipping through physical media helps you see connections you miss looking through streaming services. But I think having the digital files on hand also helps you see connections. Sometimes different connections.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve discovered some great music through Youtube just like so many other people these days. But I like having my old methods available too. Including MP3.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
A bit off-topic, but your mention of “The king is dead. Long live the king!” reminded me of a famous anecdote from British history. Upon Queen Victoria’s death at Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, the staff lowered the Royal standard. When confronted by the new king, Edward VII, about this, he was told, “The Queen is dead, sir.” To which Edward replied, “But the King lives!”
I remember mp3 being an absolute revolution in 1998.
These days, I still use nothing but mp3s. I use Mediahuman to get files from YouTube because I never know when I song I want to hear might disappear, and I run my own radio station, so I’ve got to have control of my media.
20 years from now, I’ll still be using mp3s, played on Winamp, broadcast by ShoutCast. 🙂
I also have a media server that also has many mp3 files from 2 decades ago, it is almost a fossil of my existence in the computer industry.
mp3 is still widely used, because it still has excellent audio quality, mp3 320kpbs is a good substitute for those who do not want to deal with large FLAC files or need maximum compatibility.
AAC is the most widely used currently, it is the standard format for H264 and H265 movies, in addition to being the standard for the iTunes Store (Apple helped to spread AAC, so much so that it has its own encoder), but efforts are being made on Opus, an excellent audio codec that is 100% free and open source, and is the standard for the AV1 codec, which promises to replace the highly patented H264/65, just like AAC is.
With the world increasingly streaming, people make less use of offline media, mp3 still persists in the music collection of many
I still use local media, including MP3s rather than streaming, so I can have more control of what I can see/hear/read, without the worry of it disappearing.
However I do find MP3s annoying when ripping a CD and trying to get gapless playback when ripping each CD track as a separate MP3 file. Remember many CDs go to a new track, but there is no interruption to the music.
The examples that come to mind are works like Pink Floyd – The Wall, or the third and forth movements of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.
There are some tweaks that can be done when ripping MP3s, but the MP3 player (whether software or hardware) has to support the unofficial “MP3 gapless playback” too.
So I’ve started ripping in other patent free formats that I don’t have to stuff around with, just to get gapless playback! I may be being pedantic, but those little interruptions when the next MP3 file in the playlist begins really annoy me. Maybe it’s just me, but I like to hear the “flow” of the music the way the artist intended!
Obviously there can be compatibility issues with some devices, but there is no reason I can’t rip/recode into MP3 too.
I agree with Gideon’s comment above, with the caveat that I’m a pedant and get annoyed at gaps in playback, between MP3 files. 🙂
IMHO, WinAmp 2.x had one of the best music player user interfaces ever – simple and straight forward. In twenty years, I too will be playing local files with WinAmp 2.
Well sort of:
I actually use the open source Audacious or QMMP players. Both support WinAmp 2 skins, so I run them with the original WinAmp 2 skin installed!
FYI: Heaps of WinAmp skins can be found on Archive.Org, including the original WinAmp 2 skin.
Both Audacious and QMMP run on Windows, Linux/BSD and MacOS; so even if you aren’t running Windows, you can still get your original WinAmp 2 fix and continue to “whip the llama’s arse” all these years later! 🙂
Now, I just need to get the Geiss and Milkdrop visualisation plugins working too! They were so fixating!
All the best.
I still occasionally buy mp3s and I often buy used CDs and rip them to mp3 I host on my media server. I have hundreds of gigabytes in my collection. I still remember downloading mp3s on a pentium 90 laptop via a 14.4 dialup modem back in 1997.