from Hacker News

What does it mean that MP3 is free?

by foxfired on 2/6/25, 12:41 AM with 103 comments

• by userbinator on 2/6/25, 1:14 AM

  I 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

  More notable is that many H.264 patents are expiring this year:

  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

• by generationP on 2/6/25, 1:12 AM

  The 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.

• by geerlingguy on 2/6/25, 1:07 AM

  I 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.

• by theandrewbailey on 2/6/25, 1:09 AM

  I noticed. The MP3 patents expired in 2017.

  https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/consumer-electronics...

• by EfficientDude on 2/6/25, 1:11 AM

  MP3 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).

• by Eduard on 2/6/25, 1:00 AM

  MP3 is still far from niche as this article tries to hammer in repeatedly.

• by thaumasiotes on 2/6/25, 1:01 AM

  > 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.

• by skeledrew on 2/6/25, 1:36 AM

  I 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.

• by progmetaldev on 2/6/25, 1:07 AM

  MP3 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).

• by reddog on 2/6/25, 1:30 AM

  I’m going to buy a WinRar license with all the money I save.

• by ksec on 2/6/25, 7:04 PM

  >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.

• by dzhiurgis on 2/6/25, 1:24 AM

  Amazingly you are still not free to use them on iPhone's Music app.

• by walrus01 on 2/6/25, 1:55 AM

  > Kids download gigabyte-sized games in minutes.

  This is like, the understatement of the week, a single Xbox one game can now be 140GB

• by chmod775 on 2/6/25, 1:18 AM

  Fraunhofer 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.

• by lowdownbutter on 2/6/25, 1:53 AM

  > Let me tell you what you do or do not know.

• by deadbabe on 2/6/25, 1:16 AM

  Imagine when H264 patents expire.

• by qwerty456127 on 2/6/25, 1:17 AM

  Who ever cared it was not?