Comparison of audio coding formats

Notes

1. The 'Music' category is merely a guideline on commercialized uses of a particular format, not a technical assessment of its capabilities. (For example, in terms of marketshare, MP3 and AAC dominate the personal audio market, though many other formats are comparably well suited to fill this role from a purely technical standpoint.)
2. First public release date is first of either specification publishing or source releasing, or in the case of closed-specification, closed-source codecs, is the date of first binary releasing. Many developing codecs have pre-releases consisting of pre-1.0 versions and perhaps 1.0 release candidates (RCs), although 1.0 may not necessarily be the release version.
3. Latest stable version is that of specification or reference tools.
4. If there happens to be OSI licensed software available for a particular format, this does not necessarily permit one to use said codec free of charge. Likewise, if there is only proprietary licensed software available for a particular format, one might be able to use the codec free of charge.
5. MP3 license and patent status: The MP3 format is patented and therefore subject to license (expires latest: 2017). However, with multiple contenders for the patent, it is far from certain in the market who is the patent holder with the right to set pricing and royalties. A sample of prices for one patent-holder is available. In practice, there is a wide range of MP3 authoring software and MP3 encoding worldwide is often performed on a private basis and unpaid, with patent rights unenforced against end-users. See MP3#Licensing and patent issues.

Notes