The final remaining patent on the MP3 format — "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENCODING DIGITAL SIGNALS EMPLOYING BIT ALLOCATION USING COMBINATIONS OF DIFFERENT THRESHOLD MODELS TO ACHIEVE DESIRED BIT RATES" — has expired today.
There's a common list out there (compiled 10 years ago) that has two dates wrong and will doom me to well-meaning nerds issuing corrections in my mentions today. So be it; I live to serve.
@xor My eyeball is twitching in solidarity.
@xor I googled to find something to link in a fb post about this and everything I found was that list or was sourced to it oops
@BlueSpaceCanary yeah, it's The List but if you check the priority date of the last two on USPTO or Google they don't match what the list says
@BlueSpaceCanary I think there'd be corrections out there if the patent expirations were, at this point, more than mostly symbolic
@xor so can we open source that crap now? please? i personally prefer flacs but it sure would be nice to not feel guilty about having mp3s laying around :)
@xor almost: "DIGITAL CODING PROCESS FOR TRANSMISSION OR STORAGE OF ACOUSTICAL SIGNALS BY TRANSFORMING OF SCANNING VALUES INTO SPECTRAL COEFFICIENTS" is this August, and "PROCESS FOR REDUCING DATA IN THE TRANSMISSION AND/OR STORAGE OF DIGITAL SIGNALS FROM SEVERAL INTERDEPENDENT CHANNELS" is this december. But we are getting close! or, use Ogg :D
@phailurebywinning @xor I have WAY too much digital music to use FLAC for all but a handful of items. Even with modern storage, compression is needed. Also, but phone plays AAC, not FLAC. (and not Ogg )
@lexpierce @xor So the story is that we are ALMOST at the expiration of the MP3 patents. What a milestone!
@xor Cool thing. How long do we have to wait now, until AAC patents expire?
@xor and yet mickey mouse remains under copyright for almost 100 years
@xor Great, can we all switch to #Opus ~now~? http://opus-codec.org/
@xor @Guide42XYZ are there any particular features of #Opus that might make an #OggVorbis fan consider switching?
@xor Thanks for the great news !
@xor Спасибо
@xor does this mean that the MP3 format is actually a free format now?
@xor next up liblibremp3
@xor So... The patent on the quantizer expired?
@xor The quantizer in MP3 is one of those things I really hate. Ogg Vorbis uses some kind of fuzzy/noisy quantizer that makes it sound much punchier at lower bitrates, and less like the music is under water...
@xor From what I remember reading the Ogg Vorbis docs, they encode a noise floor envelope and the decoder encodes an artificial noise floor.
@xor M-P-FREE!