There’s no doubt that the MP3 format has revolutionised music and pretty much killed off the CD in the process. Developed in 1982, by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, the format allows musical tracks to be saved in relatively small files, so that lots of them can be fitted onto a portable music player and they can be quickly transferred over the Internet. All this without the quality of the audio being reduced too, which has meant that MP3s are the default format for digital music.
The Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin owned the patents to various MP3 technologies, but these have just expired and the Fraunhofer have said they are not going to renew them. In some ways this is good news for digital audio players, since it means that developers no longer need to pay a royalty to include MP3 support in their devices and software. However, the Fraunhofer’s reason for not renewing are more interesting – they simply think that MP3 is old technology and has been taken over by better alternatives, such as AAC.
What’s more, new technologies coming out, such as MPEG-H, will deliver better quality audio with smaller files and can play back 3D audio with up to 64 speakers. Pretty soon it might be time for you to ditch your MP3 files for MPEG-H, in much the same way that MP3 made CDs a thing of the past.