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What does it mean that MP3 is free?
- Eduard 2y agoMP3 is still far from niche as this article tries to hammer in repeatedly.
- GGByron 2y agoLarge hard drives and fast internet do not render obsolete the principle of frequency domain compression. MP3 and JPG will probably remain in service for a very long time. But of course, if people weren't habituated to this bogus conception of obsolescence, how on earth would Microsoft manage to sell them a word processor for $179.00?
- teractiveodular 2y agoThey don't. You now subscribe to Copilot 365 or whatever the hell Office is called today for the low, low price of $12.99 per month for the rest of your life.
- GGByron 2y agoI'm sure that's also an option but I'm looking at their website right now and it says I can own this warmed-over text editor outright for 179$. What a bargain.
- bobsmooth 2y agoI bet the average person hasn't downloaded an MP3 (or AAC for that mater) in probably a decade. Everyone streams music now.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Fast forward to today, and internet speeds have grown exponentially. A song in a more modern format like AAC or FLAC might be double or triple the size of an MP3, but who notices? You can stream a full album in lossless quality without buffering. You'd think so, but somehow this doesn't stop Jellyfin from choking whenever it starts streaming a FLAC. With no actual knowledge, I speculate that they don't bother starting to decode the upcoming track until the current track has already finished.
- bscphil 2y ago> A song in a more modern format like AAC or FLAC might be double or triple the size of an MP3 That's a bizarre statement regardless. Most streaming services that use AAC are 256 kbps, same as most MP3 downloads. Spotify's paid tier is supposedly 320 kbps MP3. Tidal free-with-ads is only 160 kbps AAC.
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoNot sure I'd call FLAC "more modern." There are college graduates younger than FLAC. I mean, sure, it's a decade younger than MP3, so you're technically correct, but it's not exactly the latest hot format.
- koito17 2y agoFLAC allows embedding a seektable but encoders rarely emit one in practice. Since FLAC boils down to a mix of verbatim subframes and linear predictive coding (specifically, polynomials with warmup samples or Rice coding), non-verbatim subframes are variable-length, and the samples for a given interval of time may even span between two blocks. It's a tricky problem, but doable, and FLAC implementations IME (libflac, libavcodec, etc.) have varying levels of accuracy when seeking without a seektable. I assume the choking described depends largely on the medium of transport (e.g. HTTP servers without support for Range headers makes streaming practically impossible), followed by some delay to "guess" the correct block to jump to then figure out which frames contain samples closest to the requested timestamp.
- progmetaldev 2y agoI appreciate this look into FLAC! I think MP3 is just such an industry standard at this point, which means nobody is really putting work into making streaming music better. There isn't enough of an audience to push for ever higher quality, especially since most people have moved away from stereos to computer speakers, and mostly listening through their awful cell phone speaker!
- corysama 2y agoNot that long ago I got in a lovely HN argument over Why bother with the complexity of FLAC for 2X compression at best vs. the absolute stupid triviality of RIFF containing PCM? The only swaying feature was standardized metadata :P
- geerlingguy 2y agoI still rip every audio CD (including audiobooks) into MP3 and I have about 8 GB of MP3 audio files in my library (a lot of children's audio books in there for the kids). The format plays on nearly every device that plays any kind of music ever made, files are tiny, and they sound amazing still. It's so much different than like 480i videos from old VHS and DV tape imports from the MP3 era.
- tombert 2y agoI understand for Audiobooks, but why use anything outside of FLAC for music CDs in 2025? Honest question, not trying to stop you from doing what you're doing. I also still rip audio CDs, but I don't compress with anything that isn't lossless. Hard drive space is super cheap nowadays, and FLAC is even supported natively in my browser.
- thombles 2y agoSpeaking as someone who has filled up his phone pushing music onto it via SyncThing - 320 kbps MP3 gets me a lot further than FLAC!
- tombert 2y agoFair enough; makes me wish that MicroSD card slots were still standard on phones. If you had a 512GB card, then you'd be able to get an awful lot of lossless music on there. I've heard Opus is a better bang-for-buck for the size to quality ratio, but I haven't tried it yet.
- snapplebobapple 2y agoTry opus, it sounds dramatically better and has smaller file sizes
- cypress66 2y agoNot him, but I use lossy because phones have small capacities and I can't be bothered to have lossless on pc + lossy on phone.
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- progmetaldev 2y agoMP3 is still more widely supported in most devices. Taking existing MP3's, which is going to be most people that deal with MP3, and converting them to FLAC is not going to have a benefit (along with taking time, and needing to deal with tagging, of which I may be wrong but believe MP3 has better support and more tags - on top of being able to create your own key:value tags).
- CharlesW 2y ago> MP3 is still more widely supported in most devices. AAC (including HE-AAC variants) support is also a universal option, having been included in devices since ~2010. As I understand it, all AAC-LC and HE-AACv1 patents have expired.
- ksec 2y ago>having been included in devices since ~2010. AAC-LC goes much further back. iPod was introduced in 2001. Practically all devices in 2003 already supports AAC-LC when the format was introduced in 1997.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoI noticed. The MP3 patents expired in 2017. https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/consumer-electronics/mp3.html https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/consumer-electronics...
- EfficientDude 2y agoMP3 is still the standard lossy audio format. Plays on everything, patent-free. OK sound quality (some stuff falls apart even at 320 if you have golden ears).
- free_bip 2y agoRealistically, what modern device won't play OPUS files? According to xiph.Org[0] it's transparent at 120
- chocolatkey 2y agoIt’s actually still a bit tedious on the Apple ecosystem. On the web (Safari) you have to wrap it in a WEBM or CAF container, and on iOS it’s similar. That’s a lossless process, but it’s still not the OPUS container
- cageface 2y agoThe next update to my player is going to support Opus. It would be nice if it was better supported by the OS though. https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon
- flas9sd 2y agotrue, but the complexity is greatly reduced between a caf container and (since Safari 17.5) a webm encumbered opus: the provider can offer 1 webm file to all platforms. Especially in podcasts where it's just voice the savings in storage and traffic are significant. My own listening preference is 32kbits opus at ~1/4th size of the original 128kbits mp3.
- qwerty456127 2y agoTo me it seems OPUS is transparent at much lower than 120. 32 is more than enough for books/podcasts, 96 is more than enough for music. I doubt above-96 makes much sense for OPUS - I'd use FLAC if I needed better quality.
- generationP 2y agoThe reason why no one noticed is that everyone has been trivially circumnavigating the patents for decades (the usual model being a converter that doesn't come with its own lame.dll but asks you to put one into its folder) and Frauenhofer hasn't been caring much when it was private users as opposed to hardware manufacturers. If not for this, something like Ogg Vorbis would have taken its place. As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.
- esrauch 2y agoI sometimes wonder if the name "ogg vorbis" hampered its uptake. MP3 is admittedly a pretty jargony name too but isn't otherwise "weird", compared to Ogg Vorbis is just Klingon-esque.
- aeonik 2y agoThe name didn't help, but the biggest issue was when I first encountered the format it was very difficult for me to find software that could play it. It's been a while, but IIRC Windows Media player and Realplayer didn't like it, I can't remember if WinAmp the time supported it either, I think it may have gotten it eventually?
- theandrewbailey 2y agoWinamp supported it by around 2004.
- progmetaldev 2y agoAdoption on Windows was definitely an issue for that time frame. Even as someone that was willing to adopt strange software, or compile it on Windows, it just wasn't worth it for the cross-platform use (mostly for mobile devices at the time, including generic players, and iPods). I started using RockBox around 2005/2006, but it still wasn't worth converting my entire music collection to Ogg Vorbis from MP3. Right around that time, my vehicle stereo could suddenly support MP3/WMA files, and I could burn multiple albums to a CD for my truck stereo. MP3 had the broadest support across devices, and basically become an industry standard, even with the licensing.
- userbinator 2y agoI don't know why this article says "now". It was over 7, almost 8 years ago that the final patents on MP3 expired. There was even HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645 More notable is that many H.264 patents are expiring this year: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
- simonw 2y agoThat H.264 page is almost fantastically useful, except that I find it quite difficult to read the page and understand when the remaining US patents are due to expire. Maybe I am just too impatient!
- latexr 2y ago> I don't know why this article says "now". It was over 7, almost 8 years ago “MP3 is now free. It was free seven years ago, but it is now too.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLAe3RyMDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLAe3RyMDk
- progmetaldev 2y agoA Mitch Hedberg quote isn't as appreciated as it once was, but it still is!
- hatthew 2y agoI used to appreciate that mitch hedburg quote
- runevault 2y agoI had not seen h.264 was finally freeing up. That's huge news to me.
- bubblethink 2y agoFedora supporting h264 OOTB will be a huge win. The current setup with mesa freeworld, rpmfusion, etc. is comically bad. Year of the linux desktop FTW.
- chmod775 2y agoFraunhofer must've taken a quite a hit to their budget, or so I thought, but it turns out that revenue from MP3 licensing was only about ~100 million EUR annually. Seems the license came quite cheap anyways.
- deadbabe 2y agoImagine when H264 patents expire.
- userbinator 2y agoDepending on where you are, that's "already" or "soon".
- newsclues 2y agoWhat do you think will happen?
- qwerty456127 2y agoWho ever cared it was not?
- gweinberg 2y agoBusinesses making sound files. I think there were always free (legal) players for end users, but if you were going to distribute mp3s commercially without a licence you could well get sued.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoAmazingly you are still not free to use them on iPhone's Music app.
- snypher 2y agoI plugged my S23 into a computer to copy files from it and my iPhone-using co-worker looked at me like I was a wizard. There is such a major culture gap on how the different device families work, and so hard to understand the other family.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoYeah you can plug iPhone into computer, which I haven't done for years now. Only reason was to load it up with mp3s. Last weekend I've tried to do the same without a computer and basically you can only use players like VLC which only allowed me to load single file (playlists are there, but again you have to connect to computer). Edit: Just tried one more time and you can place files into VLC folder (using Files is a bit tedious tho) and they appear in VLC player. Yay.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y agoIt's annoying as hell though--with Android devices you can see Downloads or Pictures or whatever and move things to and fro as you please. With ios you need a Mac and you are stuck with the 'Photos' app and or otherwise it's some ugly abstraction with weird year_month_day directories all over the place.
- scarface_74 2y agoMP3’s have been supported by Apple’s devices since the first iPod came out in 2001. The headache is that there is no way to transfer files to add to your Music library locally except from your computer like it was still 2001. Yes, I’m aware of the work around using GarageBand for iOS.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- reddog 2y agoI’m going to buy a WinRar license with all the money I save.
- mldbk 2y agoUnderrated '00s comment :D
- skeledrew 2y agoI will never forget bow one of the pains of using Ubuntu was figuring out his to get my MP3s to play. It delayed my full adoption of Linux by years and led me to using Kubuntu instead, which I continue to use today.
- silisili 2y agoIIRC, and I might not because it's been many years now, all one had to do was install gstreamer-plugins-ugly. Sure it wasn't obvious, but a quick search should have revealed that?
- skeledrew 2y agoDefinitely not obvious, and at that time I wasn't even aware of many of the resources, it even how to search well. Coming from a Windows world, all I knew at the time was that something which I'd taken for granted just didn't work. The ideal was nice, but it wasn't practical.
- lowdownbutter 2y ago> Let me tell you what you do or do not know.
- walrus01 2y ago> Kids download gigabyte-sized games in minutes. This is like, the understatement of the week, a single Xbox one game can now be 140GB
- doubled112 2y agoA 30 minute download seemed to torture my oldest the other day. We have a 1 gig fibre connection. I told him that when I was his age it would have taken until next Thursday (it was a Wednesday) and there was a really long pause while it seemed like he was processing the idea of waiting for something.
- ksec 2y ago>For software developers and audio enthusiasts, this might seem like a big deal. But, surprisingly, almost no one noticed. Because MP3 software encoder or decoder has always been free for personal use. > because the MP3 format was proprietary. MP3 is not proprietary. But I guess the word proprietary has different meaning in the modern day communication. Just like patents free. AAC-LC, baseline version of AAC, has been declared patent free by Redhat in 2017. Other than not having a true open source top quality AAC-LC encoder, ( most people just use the best one from iTunes but not open source ). There are very little reason to use MP3 today. AAC-LC was introduced in 1997, iPod was introduced in 2001, Nearly all hardware since 2003 has had AAC-LC support. Of course people may prefer to use Opus. But unless you want low bitrate, I would argue the small bitrate saving at 160Kbps+ is not worth the backward compatibility offered by AAC-LC. Or simply go lossless.