The Mp3 is now officially Dead, According to Creators of the Format.

A German foundation that owns the patent for the MP3 audio file format recently announced that it would stop licensing it, which is about as close as it gets to an official death warrant in the tech world.

But obsolescence is a slow disease, and the MP3 will live on for some time. It helped in the music ripping subculture in middle schools and high schools around the country in the 1990s, and the vast collections of digital albums that many people amassed and sometimes shared illegally online aren't going anywhere.

iTunes and others now favor AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) files which the Fraunhofer Institute also helped to create. According to Fraunhofer’s Bernhard Grill AAC is more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality.

Apple's iTunes store dominated that market which funneled music into their answer to the MP3 player market, the iPod. Apple gave users the option of using AAC almost from the start and that format has proven the eventual successor. But MP3 deserves its place in history for enabling casual users to experience for the first time the internet's true (if dubiously legal) potential for exchanging data.