> The basic encoding/decoding technology for MP3 was under a patent for all of the 90s and 00s. It wasn’t patent-free in the US until 2017. Open-source and hobb

> The basic encoding/decoding technology for MP3 was under a patent for all of the 90s and 00s. It wasn’t patent-free in the US until 2017. Open-source and hobbyist developers like myself are going to avoid anything involving patents. Haha, yep. This is partly why there were so many recordings that sounded like ass back in the infancy of music sharing and partly why we cared about bitrate. We have many more options today. Today's music sounds great at 96Kbps with AAC or Ogg Vorbis encoding, which is a big reason why streaming became, and continues to be, viable.