Look for companies with financial interest in locking down media and playback and patent cartels that want you to pay for their codecs and you will find your "fanboys". MP3 is now both license and drm free, anyone can write it and play it anytime and anywhere they want without paying a cent. For some people that thought is nightmare inducing.

> For some people that thought is nightmare inducing.

Rhetorical questions...

Who are these people for whom the thought of not making that money causes them such stress and anguish?

...furthermore, what were they like as children?

Bingo.

This seems like a natural if pathological outgrowth of tech culture obsessed with newness. When a 3 year old phone is described as ancient, obsolete, or out of support for two years, how good could a 2 decade old compression system be?

It's so ancient that it makes you assume that it has to be truly exceptional to survive that long in such an environment.

Exceptional might be the wrong term but I think there's a plateau effect: MP3 was the first mainstream codec to reach the level where most people didn't perceive any drawbacks and there's a huge inertial benefit.

I don't regret ripping my entire collection as AAC / lossless but I also acknowledge that the space savings are basically a waste of time for anyone not using good speakers / headphones in a very quiet environment, and outside of a handful of pieces susceptible to pre-echo lossless was a hedge against double-encoding in the somewhat unlikely event that the future codec landscape changes dramatically.

Modern compression schemes are better, but for most people the difference is academic.

No argument: I even have a (very few) recordings where pre-echo is noticeable but I think we're prone to over-estimating things like that versus universal support.

If the value of click-inducing wrongness wasn't such a well-understood force one would have to wonder how exactly all those writers were incentivized by owners of not-yet-free formats.

As it stands though, we just get to apply Occham: in online news media, A/Bing truth vs lies for clicks has a clear winner.

This is a symptom of PR copy paste article writing.

Exactly, they are all variations on Fraunhofer's termination announcement which of course recommends modern replacements instead of telling customers to use MP3 for free.

We are in a word where success as a write is churning out 2 fluff pieces of click bait rather than one research article.

The writers at all the AOL and Gawker franchises are the end result of this trend - a million monkeys sitting at typewriters.

Betcha it generated a lot of clicks.

tech "journalists" write about things they understand poorly. I'd love to have more insight into where the groupthink on this comes from though. maybe they're more familiar with covering other industries where an expired patent might mean that a pharma company would cease production of their brand name pill (and let generics sell it at lower margins instead)?

The did the classic lazy news thing of publishing a press release and with a new title. Nothing more than low value news filler.

Gizmodo has a history, in recent years, of this kind of ignorance. Something has changed in their hiring practices, it seems.

Depends on whose money. For anyone who does not profit from those patents (>99.99% of the world) they'll save licence fees, which would mean more money for them.

I think his implication is that patentholders encourage the support/use of the format, abstract as it is (a concrete example being PC vendors obliged to sell windows machines only).

I see your point, but like the author I think mp3 has plenty of inertia even from this point in time. Even if I overestimate mp3 usage nowadays, those other journos are getting ahead of themselves.