MP3 is dead. But, before that totally weirds you out, here’s why…
The revolutionary MP3 file format changed the game of music listening forever. Instead of physical CDs you could store weightless files and listen from your desktop, laptop or portable MP3 player — thanks to a compression algorithm developed by The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits. As research and technology advanced, however, the MP3 files never did.
Since then, another audio format, AAC — or “Advanced Audio Coding” was brought to fruition in part by the same developers, and took compression and quality to the next level. This should have killed MP3 files right away, but instead we clung to what we knew. Now, MP3 is officially becoming obsolete, as announced by its creators. It’s time to move on to bigger and better (or technically, smaller) quality things.
MP3 was actually doomed from the start, as the engineers who developed the MP3 worked on less complete information on how our brains process sound. New audio formats with richer information are constantly being created, and streaming services make adapting to the changes even easier. So, it’s time to get with the program.
As the director, Bernhard Grill told NPR, AAC is now the “de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones” and “more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality.”
R.I.P. MP3… Our inner 90s kid may shed a tear over the nostalgic term, but our ears are happy for the higher quality music to come.
