RIP MP3 - the sound file that changed the world is declared dead | TechRadar
http://www.techradar.com/news/rip-mp3-t ... lared-dead

Er, they're still pretty popular last time I checked... Even though they are pretty fcuking awful and always have been, but they still have their uses.

Anyone here use other formats?

It's not quite dead, there are still legitimate uses for it when you need low-bandwidth delivery, but it's been smelling funny for a number of years now.

I am about half-way through re-ripping my CDs to AIFF.

I rip to FLAC. But you can't buy that on Amazon

The patent ran out last week, so of course it is dead; they need to find a new format, with new patents, that they can charge licensing fees for.

They declared the patents and licenses as terminated, not that the format is dead. They just can't earn any money from it any more. That has nothing to do with its usage or popularity - well, it is now baggage free, so can be used on more devices and on Linux without worries (for a long time, GNU Linux distributions never came with MP3 playback, you had to load the codecs from a non-open repository).

Edit: I still have all of my music in MP3 format (256kbps). Not going to re-rip it all, it took me a month last time! And that was just the CDs.

I still have all of mine (actually its SWMBO is more the music fan) in MP3 and see no reason to re-rip it

Is there any point in using lossless compression like FLAC or Apple lossless for audio? IME the savings are entirely dependant upon the amount of dynamic range in the audio. That means for music with lots of loud and quiet bits like classical and some jazz you might be lucky enough to compress the pieces to around half their uncompressed size. For rock or pop which has a lot more level compression applied to the signal, the data savings are significantly smaller - around 20% at best. Some heavily compressed tracks with brick-wall limiting are only 5% smaller!

Also having to decode the compression adds another source of potential corruption to the audio signal.

That's exactly what i interpreted from the article.

My car audio won't play anything more funky in terms of digital formats than MP3, so I'm going to be using them for quite some time yet.

ditto. all of my music collection is ripped to MP3 and works in everything i want it to ...