MP3 Format Terminated, According to Its Creators

The MP3 Format Is Dead, According to Its Creators

As NPR reports, The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits – a division of the state-funded German research institution that funded the MP3’s development in the late ‘80s announced

Licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated.

iTunes and others will now be adopting AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) files, which the Fraunhofer Institute also helped to create. Streaming services on the other hand are, for the most part gravitating towards “Master Quality Authenticated” files. According to Fraunhofer’s Bernhard Grill, AAC is

more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality.

This is obviously big news but lets not panic just yet and delete our music library! Although the extension of the license for the format has been terminated by its creators, there is still a phenomenal amount of MP3 music globally and of course all the DJ kit that supports it so it’s not going to disappear over night.

When the MP3 format first came about there was an essential need to compress music as much as possible, hard drives were tiny (120GB was a boasting size down the pub) and internet speeds were a mere 56kbps. Just trying to view a single image on the internet took minutes to load and transferring a digital music file could take all night. All of that seems a distant memory now as we take USB’s to gigs which have double the size of most tower PCs back then and we download HD movies in minutes so is this a good time to enforce a higher quality of music?

In short, yes. We are certainly not opposed to MP3’s for DJ’s, in fact we’ve DJed with them for years but time and technology moves on so must we all. Gone are the limitations of download speeds or storage so why not fill them with high quality audio files, after all it’s your reputation that’s out there each time you play and having high quality music from a trusted source can only be a good thing. If you need a refresher on understanding Digital music files check out our article.

Keep an eye out for an article coming soon on this change and what options are available for DJs