Now, 22 years later, the MP3 truly is dead, according to the people who invented it.22年后的今天，MP3格式的发明者宣告了它的月落幕。The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a division of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3s development in the late 80s, recently announced that its licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated.MP3问世于上世纪80年代末，由德国国立研究机构夫琅和费集成电路研究所资助研发。

近日，该研究所宣告“特艺集团和夫琅和费集成电路研究所早已中止了某些MP3涉及专利的许可”。Bernhard Grill, director of that Fraunhofer division and one of the principals in the development of the MP3, told NPR over email that another audio format, AAC — or Advanced Audio Coding, which his organization also helped create — is now the de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones. He said AAC is more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality.夫琅和费集成电路研究所主任伯恩哈德·格里尔和MP3的一位研发负责人，在一封寄来NPR的邮件中回应，研究所发明者的另一种音频格式高级音频编码（ACC）早已沦为了手机iTunes音乐和视频等内容的标准，ACC格式享有更高的效率和更加强劲的功能。As Stephen Witt illustrates throughout his excellent opening chapters in Witts How Music Got Free, the MP3, before upending the musical world as we knew it, almost died in the research lab.史蒂芬·维特在《音乐是怎么显得免费的》开篇中写到，早在MP3政治宣传整个音乐产业之前，它就早已死在了实验室里。

The team of engineers that invented the format was attempting to make it possible to send audio over telephone lines, which could only transmit small amounts of data. Fraunhofer — in competing for the legitimacy it needed to persuade tech companies to actually use MP3s, and so actually make money.研发MP3格式的工程师团队最初企图要让音频格式通过电话线传输--我们告诉它的传输速率十分快--谋求到合法性后再行将其卖给技术公司，以取得收益。It was repeatedly beleaguered by clever corporate sabotage and later by piracy.惜这些希望总是被正版等诸多问题所阻扰。Other failures hinged on the need for the world to catch up with the technologys possibilities: Along the way, one computer engineer on the team had a patent for a music streaming service denied by the German government because it was technologically absurd at the time.另外，MP3格式的研发团队在做到技术态势上也变得无所适从。实验室的一位工程师在当时就明确提出了音乐流媒体服务的设想，却遭了德国有关部门的上诉，因为这在当时显然就是天方夜谭。

In early 1995, the format was on life support, with one licensing deal being the use of the technology by hockey arenas across the U.S. (That spring meeting in which the MP3 was declared dead came months later, after another failed pitch that denied it being standardized and widely adopted.)早在1995年，MP3格式开始了自己的生命周期，它首先被应用于在美国的冰球球场上。然而它的生命周期只不过只有一年，因为各种各样的错误，研究者们一直没能使MP3格式标准化和普遍拒绝接受。

A little later, Fraunhofer began giving away the software that consumers needed to turn compact discs into MP3s at home. The rest is recent history.之后，研究所要求向消费者免费赠送给软件，希望用户将传输磁盘上的歌曲转存到家用电脑MP3文件中，从此这一格式之后以求广泛传播。And its not just that more efficient and complete ways of storing music have been developed. There was a deeper problem.尽管MP3比其他存储音乐的方式更为高效，但还有一个相当严重的问题。The engineers who developed the MP3 were working with incomplete information about how our brains process sonic information, and so the MP3 itself was working on false assumptions about how holistically we hear.MP3的开发者们在展开研发的时候，并没几乎做到了大脑处置声音信息的科学知识。因此，MP3错误地舍弃了许多适当的信息量。

As psychoacoustic research has evolved, so has the technology that we use to listen. New audio formats and products, with richer information, are arriving.随着心理声学研究的变革，涉及技术也大大完善，新的音频格式和产品层出不穷，它们支撑着更加非常丰富的信息量。So is it the end of an era? We may still use MP3s, but AAC is indeed much better — its the default setting for iTunes now — and other formats are even better than it, though they also take up mountains of space on our hard drives.那么，MP3时代否完结了？实质上，我们依然可以用于MP3。然而，作为iTunes配置文件格式的ACC显然更佳一些。虽然其他的一些格式有可能比ACC格式更佳，但是却有可能闲置我们大量的硬盘空间。

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