>For software developers and audio enthusiasts, this might seem like a big deal. But, surprisingly, almost no one noticed. Because MP3 software encoder or deco

>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.