If buying from iTunes, you can choose ALAC, which is royalty free.
Patent-encumbered audio codecs are popular at this point because of network effects, not technical superiority. There are many ways to reduce the network effect, even without changing music buying habits. For example If you're a website designer, include a royalty-free audio format as one of your <audio> srcs. As a bonus, you'll save some bandwidth.
How do I "choose" ALAC? I thought only select albums were available losslessly.
Support Bandcamp. Support Databeats (storefront for many drum 'n' bass labels). Hell, support Beatport and Juno, even though they insist on huge markups for WAV/FLAC.
I'm glad Bandcamp and even CDBaby support FLAC for the same price. I feel like it's the best format for balancing quality vs size, and it's more open than ALAC.
I'm loving Bandcamp so much. Buy an album once, you get FLAC, plus any other formats you might want (yes, you can always encode FLAC to anything else, but the convenience of just downloading the oggs is nice). I can't imagine buying music from anywhere that doesn't do this now.
The same way I do (and you do): get both ALAC and FLAC downloads from Bandcamp. ALAC for now, FLAC if you want to play your music on systems that won't run iTunes.
As I understand it, this is the year that the last of the MP3 patents expire, nd some already have, but there are still two left. One of them expires on August 29, and the last one expires on December 30.
It seems kind of odd to do this so late in the patents' life, though. I understand the general theory behind a last-minute cash grab, but you generally can't take "last-minute" quite this literally. Why wait so long?
Wikipedia says that MP3's last patent expired in the United States last month:
If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015 [...] If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 [...].
Wikipedia also says (unless I'm missing something) that all the MP3 patents have already expired everywhere else too. If this is true, then Fraunhofer is ending their licensing program just because they don't want to bother getting people to pay for something they can now legally have for free.
Patent-encumbered audio codecs are popular at this point because of network effects, not technical superiority. There are many ways to reduce the network effect, even without changing music buying habits. For example If you're a website designer, include a royalty-free audio format as one of your <audio> srcs. As a bonus, you'll save some bandwidth.