[nailer]

There was also VQF from Yamaha, people seriously had discussions on whether MP3 or VQF would become the dominant format.

Oh also Fraunhofer uploaded the mp3 source to the ISO website for years with no license, let the community build on it for years (I feel like they knew) and then asked everyone for a minimum of 10K USD.

[bitwize]

Even Bill Gates knows you let people pirate the product first, then squeeze them for license fees.

[RajT88]

VQF was indeed better. Smaller files, same fidelity.

I cannot remember all of them now, but there was a few like that.

[kybernetyk]

Fun fact: Apple's CoreAudio to this day can't output MP3. It can read it fine just not write it. :)

[astrange]

The iTunes MP3 encoder is really bad, so nobody should want it to.