i am pretending not to see them, instead i pour the milk

Boing Boing reports that after more than two decades the Frauenhofer Institute will not seek to renew its licensing programme for the revolutionary but now ubiquitous and in some senses obsolete audio format mp3.
It’s worth taking a look back at the origin story of the one-time industry standard whose encoding relied on “psychoacoustics” to achieve more compact sound files by stripping those background noises that didn’t directly contribute to the listener’s experience. Because the human ear is not so attuned to detecting changes in repetitious sound, engineers sampled a track of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner to calibrate the compression, the approximation of the soundscape and make sure that they weren’t sacrificing too much of the recording quality with their algorithm.