Remembering the DAT war

Waking up briefly to mention an interesting article…

In 1986, the RIAA was outraged that Sony’s Digital Audio Tape (DAT) would let ordinary consumers record high-quality sound. The format was expensive and never caught on in the mass market, but it led to other digital audio formats. In retrospect, we’re lucky to have reached a state where we can record sound without mandatory DRM. (If you don’t believe me, recall that strong encryption was once outlawed.) The article mentions that “Computer manufacturers successfully lobbied to exempt CD-ROM drives from copyright protection technology.” Our technology would be much less advanced today if we had to jump through copy-protection hoops every time we used a computer.

MP3 is dead. Long live … what?

Update: My statement that Fraunhofer declared MP3 dead was completely wrong. Please read this retraction.

There’s the blatantly obvious. Then there’s the blatantly cynical, who-cares-if-you-see-right-through me obvious. I’m not talking about Donald Trump but Fraunhofer. The patents which gave them revenue have barely expired on the format, and they’ve suddenly decided that MP3 is dead. They’ve even crowned its successor: not any open format, of course, but AAC, which can provide patent revenues for years.

The curtain falls on MP3 licensing

The site mp3licensing.com now redirects to the Fraunhofer website. MP3 licensing is a thing of the past.

MP3 licensing officially ends April 23

As I mentioned in my previous post, I wrote to the contact address on mp3licensing.com about why the site still said licensing was required. Today I got this response:

MP3 patent holders haven’t conceded

Update: Technicolor is conceding as of April 23.

Although it appears that all patents on the MP3 encoding have expired, the people collecting the licensing fees haven’t conceded. The FAQ on MP3Licensing.com still says:

Do I need a license to stream mp3 encoded content over the Internet? Yes.
Do I need a license to distribute mp3 encoded content? Yes.

For developers and manufacturers:

I want to support mp3 in my products. Do I need a license? Yes.
I have my own/third party mp3 software. Do I need a license? Yes.

Why MP3 freedom matters

Yesterday I mentioned MP3 Freedom Day to a friend, and he asked why it mattered. That’s something I should have explained. The MP3 patent holders, principally Fraunhofer and Technicolor, demand payment for any use of MP3 technology.

They even go after distributors of open source code. The Register reports:

MP3 Freedom Day, April 16, 2017

Get ready to celebrate! The last MP3 patent is about to expire! I think.

The Wikipedia article on MP3, as I’m writing this, claims that “MP3 technology will be patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 when U.S. Patent 6,009,399, held by the Technicolor[73] and administered by Technicolor, expires.” OSNews doesn’t list any patents beyond April 16. If they’re correct, then Easter will be MP3 Freedom Day!

Or maybe not. The “Big List of MP3 Patents (and Supposed Expiration Dates)” lists a patent which won’t expire until August 29. The Library of Congress cites this list in its discussion of the MP3 encoding format, though it doesn’t have any special authority. That patent looks dubious.

The persistence of old formats

Technologies develop to a point where they’re good enough for widespread use. Once a lot of people have adopted them, it’s hard to move on from there to a still better one, since people have invested so much in a technology that works for them. We see this with cell phone communication, which is pretty good but would undoubtedly be much better if it could be invented all over today. We see it with the DVD format, which Blu-Ray hasn’t managed to push aside in spite of huge marketing efforts. And we see it in file formats.

Most of today’s highly popular formats have been around since the nineties. For images, we still have TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and even the primitive GIF format, which goes back to the eighties. In audio, MP3 still dominates, even though there are now much better alternatives.

This is a good thing in many ways. If new, improved formats displaced old ones every five years, we’d be constantly investing in new software, and anyone who didn’t upgrade would be unable to read a lot of new files. Digital preservation would be a big headache, as archivists would need to migrate files repeatedly to avoid obsolescence.

It does mean, though, that we’re working with formats that have deficiencies which often have grown in importance. JPEG compression isn’t nearly as good as what modern techniques can manage. MP3 is encumbered with patents and offers sound quality that’s inferior to other lossy audio formats. HTML has improved through major revisions, but it’s still a mess to validate. For that matter, we have formats like “English,” which lacks any spec and is a pile of kludges that have accumulated over centuries. Try finding support for supposed improvements such as Esperanto anywhere.

It’s a situation we just have to live with. The good enough hangs on, and the better has a hard time getting acceptance. Considering how unstable the world of data would be if this weren’t the case, it’s a good thing on the whole.

Want FLAC on your Mac? Try Vox

iTunes is horrible and keeps getting worse. The current version has come down with dyslexia; it can’t even play my files in order. On top of that, it supports a poor range of file formats, knowing nothing about popular open formats like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. QuickTime Player has a saner user interface but the same format limitations. If you want to play music in those formats, you need to look for other software. I’ve just grabbed Vox for OS X, and it handles those files nicely.

It’s not an iTunes replacement, even if all you want to do is play music that’s stored on your computer. You can import your iTunes library, but you can’t view the contents of your playlists (which it calls “collections”) or select items from them. What it does let you do, though, is play FLAC, AAC, ALAC (Apple Lossless), Ogg, MP3, and APE files.