Alan Cross (0:00)

Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music, early and ad free on Amazon. Music included with Prime. It's Spring Black Friday at the Home Depot. So what are you working on? If you're sprucing up your lawn, you know there's no such thing as too much mulch, so don't miss this special. Buy five bags of Scott's EarthGrow mulch for only $10 at the home Depot. Promote healthier soil, prevent weeds, and beautify your yard with mulch that maintains its color for up to 12. Shop 14 days of deals during spring Black Friday, now through April 16 at the home Depot. I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Ann. I'm running the Boston Marathon, presented by bank of America. I run for Dana Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life, even with cancer. Join bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can@b of a.com supportan what would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025. In 1994, a former fiber optic technician named Ricky Adar was given a presentation of some new technology. Adar, who is British, had recently turned his attention toward the music industry. He'd become besotted with this new thing called the Internet and and believed it could be used to sell and distribute music online. Again, this is 1994. The Internet had just opened for public use, and not a lot of people were thinking about it yet. But Adar believed in his vision. As he was looking everywhere for funding, he met Karl Heinz Brandenburg. He worked at the Fraunhofer Society, a publicly owned research organization based in Germany, and he, too, had a vision. But like Adar, nobody wanted to hear about it. After years of work, Brandenburg and his people had developed a software algorithm that had been chosen as the international standard for compressed audio on these newfangled things called CD ROMs. The technology was called ISO MPEG1 audio layer 3, or eventually MP3 for short. But few people seem to care about this new algorithm, outside of some very narrow applications. But Adar got it right away. Do you realize what you've done? He asked Brandenburg. You've killed the music industry. Brandenburg was taken aback. That's not our intent, and frankly, I don't think that will do it. Famous last words, right? A few months later, people at the Fraunhofer Institute noticed that something weird was going on. Newsgroups started by early adopters of the Internet were discussing the potential of Layer three software when it comes to encoding music. And shortly after that, song files started being traded online. This was the beginning of the rise of the MP3. And yes, it did kill the music industry, at least the old one that insisted on selling fans their music on pieces of plastic. The MP3 brought music and the music industry into the digital era. The MP3 had a spectacular rise. This tech was everywhere. Everybody was using it. But like almost everything in the universe, it had a finite lifespan. It's still with us and in many ways is still ubiquitous. And in some circles, things haven't changed at all. But yet they have. This is the rise and fall of the MP3. This is the ongoing history of new music. Podcast with Alan Cross Sleeve Like a cog, we are caged in simulation. That's Muse from the Simulation Theory album with Algorithm, which I think is appropriate considering the subject matter at hand. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and I'm going to try to tell you the story of how MP3 technology came into our lives and how it is slowly leaving it. It's a story with all kinds of twists and turns. There are heroes and villains. There are casualties and survivors. And one thing is for sure, music has been forever changed in a billion different ways by this thing called the MP3. We'll start with Professor Dieter Seitzer, a German electrical engineer who ended up working for IBM in Switzerland before joining the technical electronics faculty at a German university. His research focused on data reproduction for sound and images. Specifically, he wanted a better telephone. He looked for ways to transmit speech quicker, more efficiently, and with better sound quality down old school copper telephone lines. This was a challenge because copper can only carry so much data. By the late 1970s, he thought that if this technology could ever be developed, it would be pretty easy to send music over copper wires too. He filed a patent on it, but was denied because the person examining the patent application told him, this is impossible and we don't issue patents for impossible things. Fortunately, Seitzer had a PhD student working on this project. This was Karl Heinz Brandenburg, whom we've already met. He was part of the team of about a dozen people working on the audio transmission problem. Brandenburg believed that the solution lay in compression. If audio could be shrunk down to a size manageable by copper wires, then it would be a snap to transmit this audio anywhere over phone lines. And this became the subject of his doctoral thesis. By 1986 computer technology had finally reached a level where it could use the principles of psychoacoustics. This involves learning how the ear and brain process sound. We don't perceive 100% of the sound we hear because sounds overlap and stronger sounds bury weaker ones. We only perceive the audio that's on top, if that makes any sense. The sounds down front mask the sounds at the back. These concepts were conceived by a researcher named Eberhard Zwicker, who had been a mentor of Dieter Seitzer. Brandenburg's concept was that an algorithm should be able to strip out all the audio the brain can't perceive. Who would notice that something that they couldn't hear in the first place wasn't there at all? The advantage to doing this was that the digital audio file would be made smaller. Okay, but how small? That was the question. Research intensified in 1987 into something that became known as high quality, low bit rate audio coding. The Fraunhofer group featured Brandenburg and five associates. The institute finally acquired the patent that Seitzer had failed to get a decade earlier. Their goal was to take a full sized audio file from a compact disc known as a WAV file, and shrink it down to one twelfth its original size with as little alteration to the audible audio as possible. One of the first things they decided that this wasn't going to be about streaming compressed audio from a central server. It was going to allow people to create files playable and storable on their own computers. This is probably the right time to offer another song about technology. It's from 1981. Its craft work and home computer. Working with the theories of psychoacoustics, the Fraunhofer team embarked on a long series of experiments. They started by taking 10 second clips of material from CDs, shrinking it, and then using some extremely expensive headphones, listened for errors or glitches in the compressed files. They used descriptive names like Muddy and Hiss. They had to combat audio artifacts like doublespeak and pre echoed. Bernhard Grill, a computer programmer in his mid-20s, was obsessive about audio. It was his ears that tested every version of the software. He tried every form of music. Rock, metal, funk, jazz, classical, pop, everything but rap, because, well, he hated rap. Grill also tested recordings of people who talked really fast, people with different accents, bird calls, crowd noise. He had audio of jet engines sourced from Boeing and I love this. He also used the sounds of a hockey game. Grill determined that capturing the sounds of a crowd, skates scraping on the ice and pucks booming off the boards were very hard to shrink properly. So, yes, MP3 technology was made possible in part by hockey. Now, hold that thought, because hockey plays a vital role in this entire story. But the most famous tests were carried out with a two minute a cappella song by Suzanne Vega. Grill was frustrated at the math involved in creating a compression algorithm that could handle something as simple and as pure as a lone human human voice. This is because an isolated human voice is devoid of any psychoacoustic masking. While the algorithm could handle the complex layers of, let's say, a symphony, a simple human voice had no layers of audio masking. Other layers. Grill's gold standard was this 1987 song from Suzanne Vega, Tom's Diner. First attempts at compressing it were an absolute disaster. In the team's words, it sounded like rats were scratching all through the song. I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee and he fills it only halfway. And before I even argue, he is looking out the window at somebody coming in. The Fraunhofer team, led by Bernhard Grill, listened to that song literally thousands and thousands of times as they worked on their audio compression technology. A little aside here. The Toms Diner, about which Suzanne Vega sings, existed at 2800 Broadway in New York City. It sat in for Monk's Cafe on Seinfeld. In January 1988, the International Organization for Standardization announced that it was looking for a standard for audio encoding. The search was conducted by the Moving Pictures Expert Group, or MPEG for short. Teams at Philips, Bell Labs and 12 other research groups submitted their standards proposals. The competition was a really complicated process, and I'll spare you the technical details, but you should know that there was a listening competition in Stockholm in January 1990. Everyone was given 10 different pieces of audio. That audio was encoded using the various technologies. They included a trumpet solo, someone playing a glockenspiel, two different bass solos, some fireworks, a sample of the castanets, a person reading a newscast, Tracy Chapman's Fast Car, and at the suggestion of the Fraunhofer team, Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega. Blind listening tests were carried out by young people who hadn't had a chance to damage their ears with loud music yet. All ripped files were graded on a scale of 1 to 5. And even though the Fraunhofer submission was an underdog against all these better funded labs, it finished in a tie for the top spot with a rival group called musicam. You can't have two worldwide standards for the same thing, so this tie had to be broken. The musiccam process didn't require much computer processing power, but the Fraunhofer method sounded better. It took more than a year until April 1991 before there was a decision. Three iterations were singled out. Moving pictures, expert group. Layer one, there was layer two and layer three. Layer two was the Musicam process. Layer three, the most complicated to pull off was the Fraunhofer algorithm. So great. Another format war. It was clear that digital audio was going to be a giant thing in the 1990s, and now there were two standards fighting it out. There were more competitions, and Fraunhofer lost every single one of them. Layer 2 was chosen for Digital FM radio. It was also chosen for interactive CD ROMs, the video compact disc, the thing that eventually became the DVD, and also for digital audio tape and HDTV. Layer 3 got no love at all. The team went back to work streamlining the software. By mid-1994, layer three sounded a lot better than layer two, even though it took slightly longer to encode audio. Still, though, MP2 received more support, winning the standard for audio on DVDs. So Fraunhofer was 0 for 6 in standards competitions. But there was one final chance. European radio was looking for a specialized new standard. And in early 1995, Fraunhofer made a presentation. And they lost to Musiccam again. So they're 0 for 7. It was time to give up the financial masters funding these things at. Fraunhofer was tired of shoveling money into this particular project. I mean, what was the point? Hadn't all sorts of industries spoken and made their positions clear? With the money running out, the Fraunhofer team knew they were on borrowed time. They took their roadshow to trade shows all over the world, but were always told the same thing. Your process is too complicated. We can't do it. Their savior came in the form of a guy named Steve Church. Steve was looking for ways to improve the quality of audio when it came to broadcasting radio and such. He loved the sound of layer three as and his company was called Telos. Church had several hundred audio streaming conversion boxes called Zephyrs built. Church then licensed those boxes to his biggest client, the National Hockey League. Remember how Bernhard Grill tweaked and tuned the layer three algorithm for hockey? This was perfect. On January 20, 1995, the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Red Wings went at it. The play by play broadcast used a Zephyr box, and that Zephyr box ran on MPEG layer 3. The audio quality was far superior to what listeners heard the old way, which really was just plugging a microphone into a phone line with copper wires. And it was far cheaper than satellite connections. Zephyrs were installed in every NHL rink. It was the break the Fraunhofer team was looking for. The next step was to write an MP3 encoder application for personal computers. Grill was able to code one that fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk. And this was the first step that allowed everyday consumers to create their own Layer three files. And because intel had just introduced their new powerful Pentium chips, the processing power needed to run a layer three encoder on a personal computer wasn't a problem anymore. Meanwhile, the MusicCam system needed upwards of six hours to rip a single CD. If you're of a certain age, you may remember how big Pentium computers were in the 90s. So powerful even Weird Al wrote a song about them. Whatcha wanna do? Wanna be hackers? Cold crackers, slackers Wasting time with all the chat room yackers 9 to 5 chilling at humid Packers Working at a desk with a dumb little blacker? As Pentium computers took off, the decision was made to give the layer 3 encoder away for free. Thousands of those 3.5 inch floppy disks were distributed by Fraunhofer at trade shows through 1994 and 1995. This is when Karl Heinz Brandenburg met Ricky Yaddar, who told the Fraunhofer team that they were about to kill the music industry. But the Fraunhofer people kept refining their product. They were worried that the music industry might freak out if they used a copyrighted piece of work on their experiments. So at first and again, this is 1994, they used a piece of music written by one of their own research team members named Jurgen Hair, and he called it funky dot MP3. Funkey MP3 was distributed with a license that lasted for 30 days, allowing other people to experiment with it and with a warning not to do anything more than to compress it and uncompress it. Grail was assigned one more task. Make a Layer three encoder for Microsoft. They were about to release a groundbreaking operating system called Windows 95, and he came up with something again, small enough to fit on a 1.4 megabyte 3.5 inch floppy disk. Users could install this once they got Windows 95 on their machines, and it was called WinPlay 3. Now, WinPlay 3 was rather ugly looking, but it did do the job. And in the process, MPEG Layer 3 had its name abbreviated to MPEG3. Windows 95's file system required that each file be identified by a three letter name suffix at the end. For example, a graphics program called Joint Photograph Experts Group was shortened to jpg and pronounced jpeg. And that's how ISO Moving Pictures Expert Group Layer 3 went from MPEG3 to just MP3. Oh, one more thing. Because it was so big, Windows 95 required dozens of 3.5-inch floppy disks for installation that had to be swapped out over and over again. It was cumbersome and sometimes an error loaded process. A more efficient way to install the OS was via a CD rom. And what's a CD Rom but a compact disc player installed in a personal computer. After a rocky start, which involved figuring out how to license the MP3 software, things began to take off. And when they did. Wow. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so was the relief from Ebglis. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EVGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBGLIS Lebrikizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. 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In late 1995, the Fraunhofer Institute created a public website dedicated to their new MP3 technology. It offered free downloads of the MP3 encoder for DOS, Windows and Linux. It was shareware, meaning you could take it and share the program with anyone for zero cost. And the timing was Perfect. In late 1995 and early 1996, this new thing called the Internet had started to take off with the public. Some early adopters had figured out the correlation between music CDs and the CD ROMs in their new computers. They also realized that they could download music. MP3s were great for that, even if you had a dial up modem and an older computer. Yeah, it took a while to download a song, hours sometimes, but. But when you did, the song sounded pretty much as good as a compact disc. And if you were somewhere with a high speed connection, a university, for example. Downloads were blazingly fast at 1996 standards. Of course, using this free software, anyone could download music found online and store it on their own personal hard drive. And they could Also rip a CD to an MP3 and share it with the Internet. The world had never seen such a flexible and convenient way to deal with audio. And as the months went by, regular people with their regular computers went crazy all over the free music files available. And there was nothing about MP3 files that locked them down and made them impossible to share. And because MP3 encoding technology was free, other coders got involved. Perhaps the most important of all of these early software programs was Winamp. It was released on April 21, 1997, as a media player for Windows machines. Version one was downloaded 3 million times. Version two, which was released on September 8, 1998, was even more popular. And by 2000, more than 25 million people were registered users of Winamp. If you were around back then, you'll know that Winamp was a revelation. It was easy to rip CDs and it also helped you manage your music library on your hard drive. And if you were into this new thing called file sharing, it was a godsend. Let's talk about that. 1996 saw the emergence of a loosely knit group of computer nerds in something called the wares scene. They've been around since the 1970s, communicating through old style bulletin boards, cracking software protection, and sharing things like games, porn and assorted software. Within the wear scene was an offshoot called cda, which was short for Compress d'audio. They were dedicated to music piracy, and if you were allowed into the CDA world, thousands and thousands of songs were available for the taking. CDA was the first MP3 group that we know of, and the first MP3 ever shared was Until It Sleeps by Metallica, and it was August 10, 1996. So tear me open, pull me out the things inside that scream and shout and the pain still hates me so hold me up until you see. CDA was sometimes also known as Rabid Neurosis. Both came online around 1996. Neither CDA nor rabid neurosis had a single leader or organized structure, and members of the group were not allowed to communicate with each other. There were some administrator types, but they stayed in the shadows. Over the next 10 years, thanks largely to an employee at a CD pressing plant in North Carolina who smuggled out hundreds of albums, even records that hadn't been released yet, tens of thousands of free copyrighted songs began circulating online in the MP3 format. Internet connections got faster, hard drives got bigger, sound cards became standard on all PCs. And then on June 1, 1999, a college dropout from Boston named Sean Fanning unveiled a program called Napster. Fanning loved collecting all the free music he found online, but he was frustrated by the hassles of searching and dropped downloads. Napster was a way to acquire and distribute MP3s all over the world. And now you didn't have to be any kind of techie to dive into this pool. It was so easy. All you had to do was leave your computer on and Napster running and people could come and pick out anything from your music library on your hard drive. I heard of one company that would often get pre release CDs for review, which staff would then rip to their hard drives. And then one Friday, an employee left his machine on for the weekend. And over those next two days, accidentally allowed for albums by Limp Bizkit, Madonna, Shaggy, Nelly and a bunch of others to escape into the wild via Napster. Napster quickly acquired 25 million users before it was sued out of existence by the recorded music industry. But by that time, it was too late. Other file sharing programs like Audiogalaxy, Limewire, Kazaa, Grokster, BearShare and dozens of others helped MP3s go mainstream. CD sales crashed by about 90% over the next decade, and the recorded music industry went into a tailspin again. There was nothing illegal about the MP3 technology itself, the technology created by Carl Heinz Brandenburg's team. But it was being used for illegal things. This, however, was not how the music industry saw it, at least not directly. It had a big problem with MP3 players, which they believed to be machines capable of massive copyright infringement. One of the first was the Diamond Rio, which was released in 1998. The Rio PMP 300 was immediately targeted by a lawsuit, but after much litigation, the case was thrown out, opening the way for other companies to build MP3 players. And then came the ipod. Steve Jobs introduced it at an Apple event on October 23, 2001. It was marketed as a thousand songs in your pocket. Music was managed by the itunes music player, which was a much more elegant version of something like winamp. And although it was Mac only at first, everything soon opened up to the Windows world. And then after that, everyone had to have an ipod, which they loaded up with digital files, many of which they found for free online. The ipod was developed in about a year, and in August 2001, the first ever digital file was uploaded onto a prototype device. It was by an Italian music DJ who went by the name Spiller. And the track is Groovejet. That has gone down in history as the first song ever to be uploaded on and played back from an ipod. Spiller and groovejet. If you bought music from the itunes music store, it did have digital rights management tools, at least at the beginning. Apple's proprietary file format was aac, which stood for advanced audio coding. But the ipod also supported a few other file formats, including MP3s. Tens of millions of iPods were filled with MP3s, both rips from CDs and illegal downloads. The digital era of music was underway, and it would not be stopped. But the MP3 wasn't the only digital file format out there. We already talked about Apple's aac, but then Windows had Windows Media Audio, or WMA for short. Real Audio had its own proprietary format. There was Liquid Audio and Ogg Vorbis and a variety of others. But because MP3s were so easy to use, and because there were no digital locks on the files, it became everyone's favorite and the de facto standard for digital audio. Even Apple had to include a feature in itunes that converted AAAC files to MP3s. These guys were one of the most pirated groups of the early digital era. I remember them being some kind of acid test for an illegal file sharing program. If you found a site that contained a healthy library of Radiohead songs, then that file sharing network was a good one. Radiohead, a group whose popularity, but not necessarily their bank account, was boosted by MP3 technology in the very late 90s and early 2000s. After that terribly shaky and discouraging start, the MP3 had an excellent run as the king of all digital audio media formats. But then things turned south. We'll get to that part of the story next. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling. Wherever you sell With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com tech. All lowercase. That's shopify.com tech this episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm Donna Friesen from Global National. Life moves fast these days and we want to make it even easier for you to get the news you need. That's why you can now get Global National Every Day as a podcast. The biggest stories of the day with analysis from award winning global news journalists. New episodes drop every day, so take this as your personal invitation to join us on the Global National Podcast. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. The name of this episode is the Rise and fall of the MP3 and I'm sure you had some kind of idea of its rise and its popularity. But its fall? Let me explain. From the late 90s to the late aughts, the term MP3 and digital music file were pretty much interchangeable. One and the same, kind of like Kleenex or Tissues or better yet, Google for Internet search. MP3 encoders became standard on all kinds of programs ranging from itunes to digital workstation programs like Pro Tools. We all still have them on places like our computers, our smartphones, and whatever digital music devices we may have. But here's the the era of the MP3 is over. Here are a few reasons. First, MP3s never really did sound great. Oh, they sounded good, but not great. Certain types of music get compressed better than others, but if you have good ears, it's easy to tell the difference between listening to a song that's encoded in a lossy format like an MP3, and one that has minimal loss or none at all. Although there have been all kinds of studies from psychoacoustic experts that tell us that we can't tell the difference based on the physics and math of it all. I'm sorry it's there. It's hard to explain the sonic differences, but it's something you can definitely feel. And once you start to feel that difference, it's tough to unfeel. I once ran across a study that explains this. When the brain hears an MP3, it somehow knows that masked audio has been removed and it spends a couple of milliseconds searching for it. This causes a delay in the secretion of dopamine, the feel good hormone that we get, which when we experience something pleasurable, that delay means that music from an MP3 may not feel as good as listening to music from a WAV file, or better yet, as an analog single from, say, a vinyl record or a live performance. On the subject of audio quality, composers, recording studios, radio engineers, technicians and artists have always been aware of the quality loss that comes with lossy compression like MP3s. Many only use MP3s. They absolutely have to. And since sometime in the 2000s, there's been a growing sentiment among music fans that the sound of mp3s just isn't good enough. We've seen the rise of things like high res audio and lossless audio codecs. There are FLAC files, for example, and FLAC stands for free lossless audio codec. Apple has Alacrity Apple Lossless audio codec. And if you have Apple Music, there's spatial audio streaming services like Tidal, Deezer Cuba's and Amazon Music offer high bitrate streaming. As I sit here, Spotify has yet to release their hi Fi offering, but they're promising that they will do it. But now you can hear the difference in audio quality between, let's say, Spotify and Apple Music. It's there. It's obvious you won't be able to hear the difference over the radio or in a podcast because there are other stages of compression that are employed before the music reaches your ears. But trust me, this album is so incredibly well recorded that I know of audiophiles who use it to test stereo systems worth tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's how well it is recorded. And it's from System of a Down. No. Somewhere between the sacred silence. Sacred silence is sweet Sa between the sacred suns and sleep Again, if you Want to put a set of speakers through its paces? System of a down's toxicity will show any flaws. Let's get back to why the era of the MP3 is over. MP3s were a big deal when we didn't have broadband Internet connections. Remember, the technology was created in the first place to send audio more efficiently down copper telephone lines. We now have high speed cable and fiber and even satellite connections where bandwidth isn't a problem. Not a big deal at all for our smartphones. Data rates have come down. If we must, we can still download music. MP3s. The speed and efficiency of such downloads is still great, but we now have the capability to download something better. Another reason MP3s are falling from favor is because audio and the smartphone industries have upped their game. More powerful chips, bigger solid state hard drives, and better headphones and earbuds make listening to lossless files easier. Before all the streaming music services came along, we had no choice but to rip CDs and download songs from, say, itunes and store them on our devices. Itunes used to use a lossy format based on the MP4 standard, which can be identified by the extension M4A and uses something called AAC or advanced audio Codec. And if you have to, you can convert an M4A file into an MP3. I know that's really confusing. Back in the day, we could cram a lot of music onto relatively small hard drives. Those drives are now a lot bigger. I mean, you can get a smartphone with one terabyte of memory. If a typical MP3 file is, let's say, three megabytes, a one terabyte solid state drive can hold over 333,000 songs. Doing the math, that means the same smartphone could hold somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 uncompressed songs, complete with their high quality audio. Now, we still have a long way to go in this regard. Bluetooth connections for wireless headphones and earbuds don't have enough bandwidth to properly transmit true lossless signals. That will be the next development. But the biggest hint that the MP3 is over came from the inventors of the format itself. The Fraunhofer Institute realizes that this is outdated technology, kind of like the cassette. In early 2017, it announced it was stopping support and licensing of MP3 technology. It is no longer working to make anything about the MP3 better and doesn't really care what happens to them. There are much better codecs out there, even lossy ones. Aac, for example, is superior. There's something called MPEG H. And with the continuing adoption of lossless codecs. Fraunhofer just stepped out of the way to let better technology take over. Fraunhofer won't license MP3 technology to new products Hardware manufacturers are slowly moving away from using and supporting MP3s as new audio gear comes to market. A few already won't play back MP3s because they've moved on to something superior in every way. But eventually, though, sometime in the future, MP3s will be regarded the same as eight tracks, an obsolete format because much better tech for listening to music will have completely eclipsed it. And that's what I mean. By the fall of the MP3 the MP3 changed the way we listen to and transport music. But to everything there is a season, right? At some point, our audio equipment won't bother supporting playback of MP3s. What will that mean for our music libraries? Well, first, don't worry about this happening anytime soon. MP3s will linger for as long as people use them and as long as there is gear to support them. The tech became so ubiquitous that MP3s will be around for a long, long time. It's still a de facto digital standard in many ways for many people, for both private and professional use. I imagine that we'll see some kind of slow changeover with our collection of digital files, and there may come a time when we'll have to download a converter to change our MP3s into whatever compatible file formats become the standard. Meanwhile, embrace the better audio that's available to us. Change is coming, upgrades are coming, and chances are you won't notice a thing other than the fact that your music will sound better. There are hundreds of ongoing history shows available on demand as podcasts. And yes, I did say hundreds. They're all free and you can download them wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, grab a few episodes of Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. That's my Music meets True Crime podcast. Let me know what you think. We can connect on most of the social media networks, I'm always updating my website with music news and information. That's ajournalofmusicalthings.com and it comes with a free newsletter and you can always email me about anything. I'm available through AllenAllencross CA. Technical production is by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross. Want to transform your space and your Sundays? Well, Home Network is giving you the chance to love your home with $15,000, there can only be one winner. Tune in to Renovation Resort every Sunday and look for the code word during the show, then enter at HomeNetwork CA WatchAndWin for your chance to win big. Amazing. The small details are the difference between winning and losing. Watch and win with Renovation Resort on Home Network.