MP3 Lawsuit – is it the end of MP3?

PaulSpoerry | February 26, 2007

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Alcatel-Lucent isn’t the only winner in a federal jury’s $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format.

Backers of alternative formats have sought for years to replace MP3, which offers relatively lower quality sound than next-generation technologies — including the nominal successor to MP3 itself, MP3Pro. Apple uses the MPEG industry standard, AAC; Microsoft uses its proprietary Windows Media format; and Sony has developed its own, largely ignored flavor. Open-source, royalty-free options, such as Ogg Vorbis, remain dark horse competitors. But none have displaced MP3, the first and most widely adopted format of all.

Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.

It’s not immediately clear what the implications of Thursday’s judgment are for other MP3 licensees, which include hundreds of companies who already pay royalties to Fraunhofer/Thomson — previously accepted as the only licensor of MP3 technology.

What’s interesting is that this article doesn’t even mention FLAC. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. (BTW if you want to play FLAC in Windows Media Player see this guide)This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio. FLAC is a total open source codec