The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the late 90s, as an audio compression format there is an argument to be made that it has long since been superseded by better formats and other changes. [Ibrahim Diallo] makes that very argument in a recent blog post. In a world with super fast Internet speeds and the abstracting away of music formats behind streaming services, few people still care about MP3.
The last patents for the MP3 format expired in 2012 in the EU and 2017 in the US, ending many years of incessant legal sniping. For those of us learning of the wonders of MP3 back around ’98 through services like Napster or Limewire, MP3s meant downloading music on 56k dialup in a matter of minutes to hours rather than days to weeks with WAV, and with generally better quality than Microsoft’s WMA format at lower bitrates. When portable media players came onto the scene, they were called ‘MP3 players’, a name that stuck around.
But is MP3 really obsolete and best forgotten in the dustbin of history at this point? Would anyone care if computers dropped support for MP3 tomorrow?
Alternatives
It’s hard to disagree with [Ibrahim]’s point that MP3 isn’t quite as important anymore. Still, his argument of AAC being a good alternative to MP3 misses that the AAC format is also patent-encumbered. Specifically, there’s a patent license for all manufacturers and developers of “end-user codecs,” which involves per-unit pricing. Effectively, every device (computer, headphones, smartphone, etc.) incurs a fee. That’s why projects like FFmpeg implement AAC and other encumbered formats while leaving the legal responsibilities to the end-user who actually uses the code.
While FLAC and Vorbis (‘ogg’) are truly open formats, they’re not as widely supported by devices. Much like VGA, MP3 isn’t so much sticking around because it’s a superior technological solution but because it Just Works® anywhere, unlike fancier formats. From dollar store MP3 players to budget ‘boomboxes’ to high-end audio gear, they’ll all playback MP3s just fine. Other formats are likely to be a gamble, at best.
This compatibility alone means that MP3 is hard to dislodge, with formats like Ogg Vorbis trying to do so for decades and still being relatively unknown and poorly supported, especially when considering hardware implementations.
Audio Quality
Since the average person is not an audiophile who is concerned with exact audio reproduction and can hear every audio compression artefact, MP3 is still perfectly fine in an era where the (MP2-era) Bluetooth SBC codec is what most people seem to be content with. In that sense, listening to 320 kbps VBR MP3 files with wired headphones is a superior experience over listening to FLAC files with the Bluetooth SBC codec in between.
This leads to another point made by [Ibrahim]. The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats. Yet, at the same time, there’s a resurgence in interest in physical media and owning a physical copy of content, which means dealing with files.
We see this also with MP3 players. Even though companies like Apple abandoned their iPod range and Sony’s current Walkmans are mostly rebranded Android smartphones with the ‘phone’ part stripped out, plenty of portable media players are available brand-new. People want portable access to their media in any format.
Amidst this market shift back to a more basic, less online focus, the MP3 format may not be as visible as it was even a decade ago, but it is by no means dead.
These days, rolling your own MP3 player is almost trivial. We’ve seen some fairly small ones.
Well… All my music library is mp3-320 and I dont need to change it…
same, i started also using flac when i could get flac. and there was a time id just transcode it to mp3, but i dont really need to and it shows up and sorts in winamp ok. i still use winamp. my collection is also a very small footprint in my storage stack, so its not hard to back up and maintain. people see streaming as a better option, but i dont see it that way. i dont need to search, or hand out personal information, or create an account, or be connected to the internet, or be bombed with popular bands that suck.
Switch to VBR, same quality but smaller size.
.MP3 doesn’t need the cloud (the whole physical media thing), and it’s good enough for most people, and an excellent point about Bluetooth eating up the quality regardless. Questions of bitrate are even less important nowadays because of the insane access to storage and network speed, and back when a 6 gig hard drive cost a weeks pay, a 128 kbps joint stereo .mp3 still sounded a hell of a lot better than a cassette. Not to mention that back then you couldn’t really encode them in real-time. Hardware caught up in a big way. I don’t think dropping support for MP3 would be very bright. Like the TGA image format, it will probably never die, nor should it.
The abstraction away from file systems is a travesty. Im so grateful to have learned the basics on MSDOS and Win 3.11, some folks will never comprehend the inner workings of their computing devices ( due to corporations trying to scam them out of cash ).
+1
WinPlay3 and MOD4WIN ran on Windows 3.1, btw!
Old versions of WinAmp, too, via Win32s extension.
modern is ok if you dont install all the modules. default install is a bloody mess.
Modscene represent!
thing is there is going to always be a file system, even if the gui doesnt break out all its features for the end user anymore (this is why i find phones completely unusable). on linux everything is a file, and i dont see myself keeping windows around forever (especially as my linux knowledge exceeds my windows knowledge and 11 being a no go for me). i even put rockbox on my ipod so i can just copy files to it without using a 3rd party app.
I still always have file explore open, with every program stored in it’s own folder instead of the ridiculous windows my stuff and program files, and still open things via goingto where they actually are.
As a teacher, teaching a computer based class, students have no idea how the hell to deal with files and folders :/
When releasing our CD as download, we were faced with the question which format to use. In the end we chose 320 kbps MP3 because with FLAC, Opus, Vorbis, AAC there is no guarantee that the person downloading the songs will know how to play them on their device.
¿Porque los dos?
The bandcamp method of letting you pick is better than just giving everyone lossy files.
Decades ago, when I was a teenager, I might’ve cared about ＳＵＰＥＲＩＯＲ quality of Wintersun album in FLAC format, but back then I’d never hear a difference on my tiny Creative 2.1 speakers.
As I’m getting older, I’m indifferent to whether it’s MP3 128k, 320k or FLAC. My hearing won’t get any better and all I really care about is melody and vocals, not some 20 kHz wankery.
yea, i still got some 64k mp3s in my collection, but they are black metal and it makes it sound kvlt. i should try to find better quality, but its possible the band uploaded them in that format on purpose.
The default 128 kbit/s bit rate was awful. You could hear a metallic, muffled sound.
192 kbit/s was becoming better, but still inferior to a VOC file sampled at 22 KHz.
That being said, the differences were good noticeable when you were a young person under 25 years wearing real hi-fi headphones.
Like an AKG Monitor K141 or a Sennheiser HD 515.
That’s when your were able to hear what you were missing.
With lousy earphones from the bubble gum machine you didn’t hear any difference, maybe.
That’s what many people had. Those poor earphones (in ear plugs).
Heck, even a pair of lightweight 1970s Sony Walkman stereo headphones were way better than what was bundled with mp3 players!
But in regards to the late 90s/2000 music it didn’t matter perhaps.
Users who played pop music from that era had no taste anyway and not even hi-fi could have saved the music quality. ;)
VOC file sampled at 22 kHz? Even at 128 kbits/s MP3 has higher frequency content than that VOC.
I think we can distinguish at least 3 groups of people, those younger ones that really don’t care to pay a music stream service because they don’t know there are alternatives, those who knew the old formats and ways of enjoying music but they prefer paying the service for some reason and the last group is formed for people like us,who don’t bite the “own nothing be happy” stuff ,people (like me) that don’t see anything wrong in keeping tons of mp3 files away from the clouds or playing ABBA chiquitita song in a 33 rpm LP record. And damn I get goosbumps every single time!
im still fond of the infinite storm slip track at the end of reign in blood.
Repent and believe in the gospel…hold on I’m atheist! …but yeah repent and believe :)
weird that you wrote a whole article about audio codecs in 2025 and didn’t even mention Opus once. it’s better than AAC and has a royalty-free patent license. it makes every other audio codec except FLAC (for lossless) obsolete.
AAC and MP3 do still have some value, but only for legacy devices.
i mostly keep the old formats around because its hard to find old songs in new formats on torrent sites.
Just download the FLAC and convert to opus (or whatever).
Unless you have to seed the stuff for a longer time…
I read the first half, then got the feeling they are missing opus, searched for opus and then decided it wasn’t worth to read the rest.
Opus is used everywhere. Youtube, most video conferences, … for whatever reason I don’t think it’s used for video streaming services…
Most of my music is either mp3 or aac from when HDD space was still premium. Last year I bought my girls iPods from eBay because 1. They are too young for phones. 2. I’m not gonna pay for yet another streaming service 3. Someone has hidden the rum 4. I’d like them to have the experience of a single purpose device that does that one thing well.
I’ve still got a large collection of MP3s, but I mostly use FLAC and Opus now.
Practically all my music, and I have an unbelievable amount, is in the FLAC format. My ‘Mp3 player’ plays it, my phone plays it, my computer music players play it. Yes they are bigger files but who cares, all my devices have lots of storage space.
Anyone who argues “moar data better!” has never heard of the Von Neumann bottleneck.
If you don’t know the term, it means computers are limited by their ability to move data between storage and the CPU. Even if your CPU is infinitely fast, it can only crunch the data in its registers. If it’s connected to a 1kHz memory bus, your infinite-speed CPU can’t work any faster than a 1kHz CPU.
And bandwidth doesn’t scale according to Moore’s Law. Sending a thousand bits always costs a thousand times as much as sending one bit. A 128-bit bus will always be at least 128 times larger than a 1-bit bus. A 1GHz bus will always use at least 1000 times as much energy per second as a 1MHz bus.
Know what else doesn’t scale with Moore’s Law? The energy density of batteries. To a first approximation, the amount of energy you can get from 1cc of battery is a constant. And that leads to the fundamental tradeoff of all battery powered designs: the more energy you use, the faster your battery runs out.
You know what’s always faster, more energy efficient, cheaper, and easier? Using less data.
And there’s another angle.. the Jevons paradox: making machines more energy efficient increases the total amount of energy consumption. It becomes cost effective to use powered systems for a wider range of things.
Microcontrollers are a thing.. you may have heard of them. 8-bit computing is alive, well, and continually getting smaller and cheaper in a way that does scale with Moore’s Law. The MP3 player that cost $100 twenty years ago is an afternoon’s project with a $1 chip today. That means the range of cost-effective applications for MP3s today is probably two orders of magnitude larger than it was back in the days of Napster and limewire.
Efficient data storage protocols never stop being useful.
Now it can come bundled with FFMPEG?