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Google Play Music has closed its mp3 store – here are your alternatives in 2020
Google has finally killed off its mp3 store on Google Play Music. If you are looking to download 320kbps music, here are your options in 2020!
Google has finally shuttered the Google Play Music Store, bringing sales of downloadable MP3s to an end. The move had been announced in August after Google's long and sometimes painful transition to its new streaming-only YouTube Music offering, though the option to upload your own library remains. The Google Play Music app remains active for most, but it too will be shuttered in the coming weeks, with full closure, globally by the end of the year.
It has been 24 years since MP3 originally released, and despite many efforts by various groups over the years to replace it (with attempts such as Vorbis, AAC, WMA, and others), no one has succeeded yet, but that may be changing. Unlike with video codecs, people are no longer directly searching for a royalty free audio codec to replace the most popular codec (MP3), as earlier this year MP3 itself officially became royalty free with the expiration of its remaining patents. That doesn’t mean that we have reached the end of audio codec development though. We still can benefit from further codec improvements, especially in low latency and low bandwidth situations, and that is where Opus comes in.
Opus 1.2 Codec Arrives on Your Phone: High Quality Audio at 32 kbps
The Xiph.Org Foundation has launched the Opus 1.2 audio codec, which brings substantial improvements for realtime audio. Learn all about how it changed!
The Xiph.Org Foundation just announced their latest improvement to the Opus audio codec with the release of their libopus 1.2 encoder. With this latest improvement, Xiph.Org has managed to make Opus usable for fullband stereo audio at just 32 kb/s, which will pair well with the upcoming royalty-free AV1 video format in the WebM container to bring higher quality audio and video on slower connections.