All good things come to an end. That seems to be the case with MP3.
The once controversial audio format, which brought drastic changes to the commercial music industry in the 1990s by bringing it into the digital age, no longer exists.
It seems that the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a branch of the state-funded German research institute that funded the development of MP3 in the late 1980s, has decided to no longer license the specific patents and software from Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS. In other words, they want MP3 retired and make way for other, better formats for storing music.
Bernhard Grill, director of Fraunhofer and one of the key players in the development of MP3, told NPR that Advanced Audio Coding (or AAC) is now the “de facto standard for downloading music and video to mobile phones.” AAC is the default audio format used by Apple to rip music from CDs to iTunes.
Compared to its predecessor, AAC is “more efficient and offers much more functionality,” Grill added. “Most cutting-edge media services like streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs like the AAC family or, in the future, MPEG-H. These can offer more features and higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to MP3.”
As a game changer 20 years ago, the development of MP3 began in the late 1980s at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits. The first, however, unsuccessful MP3 player was developed by Fraunhofer in the early 1990s. In 1997, the first successful MP3 player known as the AMP MP3 Playback Engine was invented by Tomislav Uzelac, a developer of advanced multimedia products. Later, two students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, ported AMP to Windows and created Winamp.
In 1998, Winamp became a free MP3 player, furthering its success, which did not require licensing for its use.
While the death of MP3 is unfortunate, it is expected to be a slow, rather than immediate, demise. The retirement of MP3 will now allow developers to focus on its successor, AAC, and raise the bar on audio quality.
