Alternative Technologies
Many other lossy codecs exist. Among these, mp3PRO, AAC, and MP2 are all members of the same technological family as MP3 and depend on roughly similar psychoacoustic models. The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft owns many of the basic patents underlying these codecs as well, with others held by Dolby Labs, Sony, Thomson Consumer Electronics, and AT&T. In addition, there are also the open source file formats Opus and Vorbis that have been available free of charge and without any known patent restrictions.
Besides lossy compression methods, lossless codecs are a significant alternative for MP3, as well as for lossy codecs in their entirety, because they provide almost unaltered audio content, sacrificing size of the resulting files. Lossless codecs include FLAC, a free lossless codec, Apple Lossless and many others.
Read more about this topic: Mp3 Files
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