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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Yea, makes me think of how every news blog reported mp3 as "dead" when the patent expired, when they should have been saying mp3 is now license free.

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Also, "mp3 is license free" rhymes :)

License free mp3 is good to see. But what we need, according to me, is for AAC to become license free.

People don't wanna pay for CDs

Now every other house holds got PCs

They download MP3s,

People please be reasonable (yeah)

How am I gonna make my g's,

If you got my album before the release,

The quality's rubbish and there ain't no sleaves,

I don't think anyone really uses mp3 for audio compression anymore, though. There's FLAC, mp4 (AAC), and free Vorbis (which claims to be competitive with both); and DVDs and whatnot are still using AC3, EAC3, and various other Dolby Digital audio formats. Given that landscape, I don't know why you'd pick mp3.

Well most pirated music albums and songs are still in mp3s. Even bandcamp I chose mp3s for itune, maybe it's bias confirmation, but I don't believe mp3 went out of style.

Do you have a source for this? Is this audio compression for music production people or in general? I just can't see mp3 being out.

I keep a library of music, ripped from cds I own. My master copy is FLAC, but I use mp3 for on-the-go copies because it is not patent encumbered and it is supported everywhere.

If you have a suggestion for an encoding+container that is will work out of the box both natively and in every major browser, across every major OS (Windows MacOS, Android, iOS and GNU/Linux, specifically distros like Fedora or Trisquel that don't ship nonfree codecs in their default repos), I will gladly switch to it.

Does Ogg Vorbis play on iOS? In my experience it has pretty good support across most other platforms. You do have to install Web Media Extensions on Windows, but that's little different from having to install libvorbis on Linux.

No, it doesn’t... on a stock build. Get the VLC app though, and then you can play (through the app, of course).

FLAC meets a different requirement. AAC isn't license free as far as I know. Many devices won't play Vorbis. So I encode to mp3 for now.

MP3 is good enough for most casual uses, and not being patent encumbered makes it easier to use. I honestly don't know why I should bother using anything else for personal audio consumption.

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