Seeing that Fraunhofer IIS have announced the end of mp3 encoder licensing, does this mean that Cubase 9 is going to be the last version of Cubase to export mp3’s
it seems AAC is the preferred replacement format, although not much good when your client wants an mp3 !
I will add, that I hate mp3’s, but I wouldn’t want it to disappear from Cubase and Wavelab.
Can I play AAC on my Samsung Galaxy S6 and my W10 PC?
Fraunhofer’s patents on MP3 expired. What this means is that any program can include MP3 encoding for free now.
You can play AAC on pretty much anything released in the past 10 years.
Thanks!
Actually it’s the end of Fraunhofer having the licensing rights. It is now open to everyone so no more licensing fee to use MP3.
If anything that could make MP3 even more popular.
No way it is going away in the near future, far to many older devices that only handles MP3 are still getting used on a dayly basis.
Personally I don’t have a preference sound vice when it comes to MP3 and AAC in their respective best Bitrate. They both sound pretty good and pretty bad depending on the source material.
I don’t dislike mp3 because of its sound quality, but I hate how it adds arbitrary silence to the start and end. No looping, no seamless play without hacks.
It grinds my gears that ogg and flac are completely superior and free, but instead of jumping to that people are now talking about AAC. There is no reason to stay with proprietary codecs.
AAC using the Fraunhofer and Apple codecs is more transparent than OGG Vorbis and has similar quality to Opus at 128kbps or higher (the most commonly used bitrates to encode music), not to mention that neither OGG codecs are as widely supported.
But it’s proprietary. It’s not worth it even if there’s a minor quality increase. And yes, there’s Opus also. If we’re gonna be stuck with a codec for years and years, let’s have it be free this time please.
Chicken and egg problem.
It’s up to software and hardware manufacturers to support free formats, not us. AAC being proprietary doesn’t affect either the music producer or the listener. Our only job when distributing our own music is to make sure it’s in a format that can be played on almost anything, and AAC is the next best alternative by far if you don’t want to encode to MP3.
But the software and hardware manufacturers will support the formats that are in use. A format is popular because music producers and stores distribute that format, not the other way around. We as a whole do make a difference, and I think it’s too soon to just give it to AAC when we can do one better.
Also, we now stream video in 4K but it would be too big of a step to distribute albums as lossless FLAC? I can’t see a better moment to change the status quo than now.
Music producers have zero influence, stores like Apple do. And they are not going to change to a format they have less control over.
Not that disagree, I use open formats wherever I can
TIP. just to keep it Cubase related, Cubase can record in FLAC, can be set in the Project Setup. Keeping everything in FLAC from start to end would negate the need to Dither