WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Developers of MP3 has officially announced that the digital audio coding format is obsolete.
Fraunhofer Institute, the German research institute, that funded MP3 has dropped ownership of it.
'On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated,' the institute said in a statement. 'We thank all of our licensees for their great support in making mp3 the defacto audio codec in the world, during the past two decades.'
The institute said although mp3 is still very popular among consumers, the services like streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H which deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3.
Users will still be able to listen to MP3 files, however, without industry support for the format.
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