MP3 Format has officially been declared dead by the creators as more and more people are marching towards different file formats that came to existence, the creator of this revolution, Fraunhofer IIS, has confirmed the sad news.
While MP3 was the format that helped us reach out to the world since we didn’t have the liberty to buy western music in the late 90s and early 2000s, the newer generation though has several other options for better audio playback and doesn’t even exhaust the limits of their hard drives.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a department of a German research institution that financed MP3’s development in the late 1980s, has made the announcement that the “licensing program for certain (not all) MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated“.
They said in a statement, “Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, MP3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to MP3“.
Since all good things come to an end for better options so has MP3, the digital audio coding format. It feels the same when computer manufacturers started installing CD-ROMs instead of Floppy drives and people will again stand (miss) against this decision but they will eventually have to adapt to the new standard developed by Fraunhofer Institute, ACC.
Fraunhofer Institute claims that AAC, Advanced Audio Coding, is the “de facto standard for music download and videos on smartphones, these days”. But the question still remains, what is the future of music streaming and playback?
Although ACC has been around for almost 20 years, it has always been considered to be an alternative to MP3 format and some of us still find ourselves hunting for songs on Google in the same audio format.
However, Advanced Audio Coding is the recent evolution of conventional audio files and it can achieve better audio quality compared to MP3 and that too at almost the same bit-rate, which makes it a widely popular option among streaming services.
When the concept came into existence, it was naturally designed to be the successor of MP3 and with the file format being widely accepted by almost every other mobile manufacturer in the world, the existence of MP3 became pretty much redundant. Even YouTube has already embraced AAC. Several years ago, when iPod was unveiled, which was also one of a kind revolution, Apple was already offering the AAC format as an option. Now, it seems like companies always had a hint about where MP3 was headed and they never found it important to tell us.
Yes, it’s true, we don’t have a choice but to accept this change and move on. MP3 will always be our childhood obsession and that MP3 player collection will always be our most prized possession. The one thing that we can cherish, although for some time, is that MP3 format is not going to be completely washed out as there are some parts in the world where this is the most prominent format, even in these days.
P.S It doesn’t mean that your MP3 collection will stop working, (No one has the right to do so. We have spent years making it what it is today) but you should also not expect seeing new devices supporting the format.