The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated

Do not underestimate the importance of software patents. It is wise to build a defensive patent portfolio.

I know this is no fun for people who are ideologically opposed to software patents, but as in most competitions, if the ruleset allows this advantage and you refuse to exploit it, you will lose to someone else who is less squeamish. There is absolutely a real lowest-common denominator effect that applies here.

If you want your startup to be acquired, you need something that a potential acquirer can't easily circumvent; that means a brand with user loyalty or intellectual property. Anything else in the software realm, Google et al could easily replicate it within a reasonable timeframe by assigning a small team to do so.

An artillery of your own ambiguous or general patents can also prevent lawsuits from others.

These are the rules of the game today, and if we want to play the game, we need to use this rule to our advantage. If we hate the rule, we need to find an effective way to petition Congress to change it. This usually means demonstrating how the current law is a clear risk for the only stakeholders Congress cares about: massive companies (particularly, major employers within their constituencies).

A lot of stuff that should be legally risky for big companies isn't, because the legal system is so convoluted and expensive, that they know only another well-capitalized company could successfully pursue a suit under such grounds. Since the big companies are generally advantaged by not "poking the bear" and instead accepting one another in a type of stasis, they avoid filing potential landmark cases that would dispense the legal ambiguity and strip the advantage against upstarts away from both parties.

"Don't hate the player; hate the game".

MP3 almost always has hardware decode which is really power efficient. This isn't as bad nowadays since audio decode isn't that intensive relative to keeping your WiFi on.

My first instinct, on being asked to create an MP3 from a WAV + some effects, is to download Audacity, diddle around, and then export to MP3. But—and I always forget the first time I do it—you have to download an additional LAME plugin for Audacity to get that MP3-export to happen.

On the other hand, Opus is just right there in the Export menu; the codec is built into the app.

(On Macs, AAC is also "right there" in Audacity's export menu, due to OS-native Quicktime encoding support; but on other OSes AAC export requires similar fiddling to MP3 export.)

And, mind you, this isn't nearly as much of a concern on Linux, where usually the app package will have optional dependencies on the MP3/AAC encoder libraries, and so—if you have your "non-free" package repositories enabled—they'll get installed along with the software.

[1] http://burnallgifs.org/archives/