Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the …
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Considering most music files are MP3, yes it's still cared about. It's easy and small.
You don't need lossless all the time.
I would argue that most people never need lossless, because most people don't use speakers/headphones with high enough fidelity to produce any acoustic difference to a high-bitrate MP3 in the first place.
I used to work with a guy who swore by his FLAC collection, and would listen to it through some $40 Skullcandy earphones. I never understood why.
The main benefit to lossless is for archival purposes. I can transcode to any format (such as on mobile) without generational quality loss.
And it means if a better lossy format comes out in the future, I can use that without issue.
A family member is an audio engineer (now also a producer) who owns a good recording studio, and we've A/B tested lossy vs lossless on good equipment. He hears things that I don't, my ear is somewhat untrained. But at mp3 bitrates below 320, I can hear compression artifacts, especially in percussion instruments and acoustic guitar. But if you're listening in your car or while wearing Bluetooth earbuds while you're out walking, you probably won't notice unless the mp3 bitrate is really dismal.
If you are using the files played back at different tempos or keyshifted, the difference between lossy and lossless is a lot more apparent. For standard playback at normal pitch, mp3 is just fine.
There are better lossy formats, like opus.
But MP3 still has its place as it's supported everywhere.
Exactly, sometimes you just wanna jam to some mp3's out of an iPod like the good ol days. It's about the ✨vibes✨
Most music files may be MP3s, but music files are rare these days. I wouldn't be surprised if most people under 30 have never interacted with a music file at all, they just use streaming services.
I am under 30, and I have interacted with music files.
edit: I don't know about where you live, but I am definitely not the exception.
The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats.
I remember someone saying that and me having a hard time believing it, but I've seen several people say that.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1dkeiwz/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_computers/
The OS interfaces have followed this trend, by developing OS that are more similar to a smartphone design (Windows 8 was the first great example of this). And everything became more user-friendly (my 65+ yo parents barely know how to turn on a computer, but now, use apps for the bank and send emails from their phone). The combined result is that the younger generations have never learned the basic of how a computer works (file structure, file installation...) and are not very comfortable with the PC setup (how they prefer to keep their notes on the phone makes me confused).
So the "kids" do not need to know these things for their daily enjoyment life (play videogames, watch videos, messaging... all stuff that required some basic computer skills even just 10 years ago, but now can be done much more easily, I still remember having to install some bulky pc game with 3 discs) and we nobody is teaching them because the people in charge thought "well the kids know this computer stuff better than us" so no more courses in elementary school on how to install ms word.
For a while I was convinced my students were screwing with me but no, many of them actually do not know the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste. If it’s not tablet/phone centric, they’re probably not familiar with it.
Also, most have used GSuite through school and were restricted from adding anything to their Chrome Books. They’ve used integrated sites, not applications that need downloading. They’re also adept at Web 3.0, creation stuff, more than professional type programs.
As much as boomers don't know how to use PCs because they were too new for them, GenZs and later are not particularly computer savvy because computers are too old for them.
I can understand some arguments that there's always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don't think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame. If one is going to consume content, okay, fine. Like, as a TV replacement or something, sure. But there's a huge range of software -- including most of what I'd use for "serious" tasks -- out there that doesn't fall into that class, and really doesn't follow that model. Statistics software? Software development? CAD? I guess Microsoft 365 -- which I have not used -- probably has some kind of cloud-based spreadsheet stuff. I haven't used Adobe Creative Cloud, but I assume that it must have some kind of functionality analogous to Photoshop.
kagis
Looks like off-line Photoshop is dead these days, and Adobe shifted to a pure SaaS model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Criticism
Shifting to a software as a service model, Adobe announced more frequent feature updates to its products and the eschewing of their traditional release cycles.[26] Customers must pay a monthly subscription fee. Consequently, if subscribers cancel or stop paying, they will lose access to the software as well as the ability to open work saved in proprietary file formats.[27]
shakes head
Man.
And for that matter, I'd think that a lot of countries might have concerns about dependence on a cloud service. I mean, I would if we were talking about China. I'm not even talking about data security or anything -- what happens if Country A sanctions Country B and all of Country B's users have their data abruptly inaccessible?
I get that Internet connectivity is more-widespread now. But, while I'm handicapped without an Internet connection, because I don't have access to useful online resources, I can still basically do all of the tasks I want to do locally. Having my software unavailable because the backend is unreachable seems really problematic.
This was actually something I found interesting with the brief TikTok shutdown in the US. A lot of creators only had their content in the editing software owned by TikTok or the app itself, meaning they lost access to all of their content.
The biggest risk of cloud only setups is you don't own it.
The abstraction away of the idea of files and folders is a deliberate user disempowerment strategy by app and mobile OS creators. The underlying concept is that the app owns the data, you don't. It also conceals the fact that use of standard file formats and directory structure conventions were developed to facilitate interoperability: apps come and go, but the data was meant to live on regardless. Of course, vendors want to break interoperability since doing so enables lock-in. Even when the format of the underlying content is standarized, they'll still try to fuck you over by imposing a proprietary metadata standard.
Just another example of enshittification at work.
Current students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it's been apps ever since.
Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.
First people didn't really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90's when I was in school, we had a few school years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just "know" computers ("digital native" and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don't know how to use computers.
Godamn this made my job feel secure
Ms 365 just assumes that your company has a Ms azure cloud solution, exchange server or just defaults to onedrive. You have to wrestle the software into giving you a local storage folder browser when picking the place to save a new document to. It's frustrating.
@dustyData Oh my gosh. I see this every single day at work. So many people have no idea where any of their documents are saved, until they can’t find them. I’ll be honest, I use a lot of streaming services for music as well, but I think I might actually go back to simply buying music. Who knows. Call me old-fashioned and only 35 years old, but I still see a point in local storage in traditional desktop type software. There’s not enough of it around here.
I owned Adobe CS 4. CS 5 and 6 had nothing new I needed. When my OS no longer supported CS 4, I purchased Affinity Suite; it still works great with no subscription or cloud hosting.
Back when the iTunes Music Store still existed, I took advantage of their feature to convert my library of audio to digitally mastered DRM-free 256 bit AAC. All my recordings of tapes and LPs replaced by professionally remastered tracks. Since then, I’ve supplemented with tracks purchased directly from the bands I’m interested in, plus some lower value stuff from YouTube.
In fact, the only cloud service I depend on is NextCloud, which I host myself, and which lives behind a VPN.
I run my own JellyFin server with all my DVD rips hosted on it. That’s a large part of my streaming video that I’d want to watch more than once.
Probably not a huge number of people do what I do, but enough to keep people employed who still make products you download once and enjoy forever.
I hear you for sure. I very much prefer local software and saved files local as well. The problem is there's more money to be made doing it the other way. Unless it's FOSS you can pretty much count on the company to follow the money.
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
Slowly and gradually over time they evolved to the abstractions of directories listing files and other directories. I think in early Unix even a directory was a usual file, just differently interpreted.
Now, instead of teaching clueless people they've made a whole culture of computing for clueless people only, unfit for proper usage.
One might see how representation of something like a lent of objects is the flat layout again. At some point it doesn't matter that there's a normal filesystem under it, or something.
One might also see how using tags to somewhat organize objects into another lent is similar to a two-level layout, where a directory can only list files.
If one is going to consume content, okay, fine.
How would one know if they want to use computers seriously if they haven't been taught, don't know where to start teaching themselves, probably have, mild or not, executive dysfunction (a lot of conditions) and, if put in the right situation, would be very capable and interested, but in the wrong situation just can't learn a single thing?
That was me, I could only reduce distractions and non-transparency after moving to Linux (and then OpenBSD, and then FreeBSD) with obscure WMs and setups. I'm born in 1996, so I had it easier.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
The original Macintosh filesystem was flat, and according to WP, used for about two years around the mid-1980s. I don't think I've ever used it, personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System
MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.
They switched to a new, hierarchical filesystem, HFS, pretty soon.
I thought that Apple ProDOS's file system -- late 1970s to early 1980s -- was also flat, from memory. It looks like it was at one point, though they added hierarchical support to it later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS
ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk's storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128 KB or more of memory.
Looks like FAT, used by MS-DOS, early 1980s, also started out flat-file, then added hierarchical support:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) was introduced with PC DOS 2.0 as well, and this version also added read-only, archive, volume label, and directory attribute bits for hierarchical sub-directories.[24]
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
This is so weird to me. Aren't people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car's engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn't install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn't write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.
Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where's the basic curiosity?
Honestly, I'm a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn't have familiarity with the concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I've always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok...most software packages don't require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don't have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.
But...I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don't, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they're just the front end to a cloud service.
Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like
scpfrom there. A file manager. Open local video files inmpvor in PDF viewers and such. I've a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I've a music player that can browse the filesystem. I've got a directory hierarchy that I've created, though simpler and I don't touch it as much as on the PC.But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don't expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software. Not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network. I'm not sure that the official YouTube app lets one actually save video files for offline viewing, come to think of it.
I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn't permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the
file://URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not...maybe that was the rationale).
It's useful because it's ubiquitous. Everything that can take in music files supports it.
Is MP3-encoded audio of the best possible quality? No, of course not. But for most people it's Good Enough, especially if you do most of your listening in a noisy environment. MP3s are to lossless formats what CD was to vinyl for so many years.
A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.
All people. 320kbps mp3 is completely audibly transparent under all normal listening conditions. It's a low-tier audiophile meme to claim otherwise but they will never pass a double-blind test.
A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.
MP3 has some disadvantages over more modern formats, regardless the used bitrate. It's been a long while since I was very interested in audio formats, so I may not be up to date on some newer developments but unless anything major changed, MP3 can't do truly gapless playback between tracks (used in live albums), for example.
From what I understand, vinyl and CDs can both output in a range greater than human ears can detect, so the medium isn't as important as the mastering and the gear being used to listen to the recording.
Vinyl is lossy in that any dust or scratches on the record can be heard in the output, so this is only true if you've got an absolutely pristine vinyl.
The original idea behind the superiority of vinyl was that the ambient audio was being recorded directly to the media. Of course, this wasn't even true when it was first made, as they were using magnetic tape by then to record in analog. However, there is still some merit to the idea that an infinitesimal amount of quality is lost when translating sound waves to digital data.
Most of the actual differences between cd and vinyl, though, can be chalked up to the loudness wars ruining the mixes on cd.
CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There's a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can't record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won't work.
It's functionally impossible to improve on "red book" CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround...Stereo.) It's why there really hasn't been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80's and still is.
This is what we were all told for years and years- that it was impossible that anyone could hear anything in vinyl that was supposed to be there but that couldn't be reproduced with digital at cd quality. Then DVD came out And people could genuinely hear the difference from CD quality audio even in stereo. It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.
I'd argue you've got that backwards; CD is to vinyl what lossless is to .mp3. That said, I know what you mean.
I still prefer mp3 because it's small and doesn't sound any different to me than uncompressed formats, so why waste the disk space? 🤷🏻♂️
I thought it didn’t sound any different to me too. That is until me and a friend were riding around listening to Icky Thump by The White Stripes for a few weeks when it first came out.
Higher bitrate, ripped directly from the CD, pretty decent car radio.
We had been listening to my copy, he didn’t own it yet.
We stopped at a record store one day when we were out and he picked up his copy. He wanted to play the CD for whatever reason, and when he stuck the disc in, “berderwiddledod dahta dah BOOM BOOM BOOM”.
I couldn’t believe it. It was like the record just sucked the power out of us both and used it to burst through the speakers.
The mp3, by comparison, sounded shrunk down from the source and splashed with water.
It didn’t change my listening habits because of convenience, but damn. It was an eye opener.
Could it be the sound system? Most people seem to prefer the convenience of Bluetooth, ubiquitous small speakers, and maybe that’s usually the limiting factor.
I stopped trying to keep up with a good sound system when my little ones decided to stuff matchbox cars into the port on my subwoofer. However I do a little set up from Bluetooth with AirTunes/Sonos, so I don’t know if the difference would be apparent. My car is by far my best sound system
I thought so too, but once I got IEMs. The drums felt more organic and I heard parts of guitars that I didn't on mp3.
Funnily enough the guy who invented MP3 earned enough from royalties to barely afford a regular house in Germany. Meanwhile Apple made billions and rose like a phoenix from the ashes thanks to Apple Music and the iPod that rely on this format.
do you think would influence developers to make their projects open source, with more leaning towards copy left licenses? they won't make much money off the code alone anyways, so might as well try to make others not profit either
I am very slightly annoyed that people haven't moved onto Opus which gives you better compression and quality than MP3. MP3s are still useful for any older devices that have hardware decoding like radio sets, handheld players, etc. Otherwise, every modern device should support Opus out of box.
Hilariously, x264 has the same problem where there are direct upgrades with H.265 and AV1, but the usage is still low due to lack of hardware accelerated encoding (especially AV1), but like everyone uses FLAC for the audio which is lossless lol.
I just use ogg vorbis and vp9 in webm container, also webp for images. No proprietary nonsense in this house. AV1 sucks on my hardware, but yes eventually.
I use it to (re)compress audiobooks, podcasts and such, they still sound very good at 32 kbps.
Fun fact, Opus has been supported by a hobby OS like MorphOS for years, my ancient hardware doesn't break a sweat playing it.I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.
I use Opus when I rip something. It's been a long time since the last case. I've left FreeBSD for Linux and returned back to
LinuxFreeBSD again since then.
Sounds fine at good bitrates, universally supported, small, efficient, everywhere.
Yeah, MP3 is just fine. Found zero reason to use any other format. And of course, while the rest of the world streams everything I'll be happily using my massive MP3 library I can fit on a tiny little storage device and take everywhere I go without the need for the interbutts and big brother keeping tabs of what I listen to.
I used to think this but the convenience won out. Now over holiday break, my teen discovered my crate of CDs that he doesn’t remember seeing in his lifetime!
And now I need to decide whether to buy a CD or DVD player to transfer to a more usable format - the last one I had was an old Xbox that is no longer with us
I don't use any one format. No idea what audio formats I have but probably a lot. Never cared, VLC takes them all.
Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.
the randomizer in my car sucks so it's the same 100 of those 11,000 songs. :-/
The randomizing n my Focus ST is good, but when I tell it to shuffle play it always starts with 1 of 2 different songs, every time.
Yeah WTF is up with that? My car does the same thing with a USB drive full of songs. It will literally play the same "shuffled" sequence over and over every time you drive. I have to take out the drive and change the files on it sometimes to make it actually Shuffle the songs' order and that's too much BS
Podcasts are almost exclusively mp3. There is no need for lossless fidelity on those. And when you are subscribed to 200 podcasts like I am a small file size matters. And when listening at 2.5x speed lossless is a complete waste.
All my podcasts appear to use the AAC spoken audio profile? It’s much smaller and cleaner than MPEG layer 3 audio.
Apple broke metadata compatibility with a recent update. The podcast producer I know with an explicit AAC feed decided to just redirect to the MP3 feed. Unrelated to that, they also increased the MP3 bitrate for better audio quality. The increased file size doesn't really matter that much compared to 15 years ago and people without unlimited data can just set their automated syncs to WiFi only.
Apart from my home hifi (which is built around flac) everything i liaten to ia mp3. Podcasts - mp3. Car audio system? Max 192kbps mp3. My phone? Full of mp3. And I'm sure I'm not alone. To say mp3 is not relevant anymore is just misguided.
I have thousands of mp3s so I'd say they still matter. As far as audio quality goes I doubt my ears, at least at my age, can tell the difference between them and a lossless format.
Anyone telling you they can hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and lossless audio is full of shit, anyway. It's still a great format for keeping file sizes small, though I prefer ogg these days.
Opus is better than MP3 in every way. File size is either better or the same, and audio is better even at lower bitrates. But realistically, most streaming services don't provide HD audio, so it really doesn't even matter.
249 webm audio only 2 │ 1.58MiB 49k https │ audio only opus 49k 48k low, webm_dash 250 webm audio only 2 │ 2.09MiB 65k https │ audio only opus 65k 48k low, webm_dash 251 webm audio only 2 │ 4.14MiB 128k https │ audio only opus 128k 48k medium, webm_dash 233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 234 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 140 m4a audio only 2 │ 4.20MiB 130k https │ audio only mp4a.40.2 130k 44k medium, m4a_dashThis is YouTube music, which generally serves the split audio from a YouTube video as a song. Most of them I checked either don't have audio above 130Kbps or don't even provide MP3/Opus anyways.
Youtube Music doesn't just serve the audio from a video. They do serve the audio from a video if nothing else is available, but they also get releases directly from the publishers/distributors.
The difference in sound quality is definetly noticeable.
Youtube Music doesn’t just serve the audio from a video.
Yes it does. You don't even need to take my word for it. Look up any song by any artist and find their official video for that song. Take this one as an example: https://youtu.be/kPa7bsKwL-c
Analyze it with yt-dlp or something similar;
249 webm audio only 2 │ 1.51MiB 50k https │ audio only opus 50k 48k low, webm_dash 250 webm audio only 2 │ 2.00MiB 67k https │ audio only opus 67k 48k low, webm_dash 251 webm audio only 2 │ 3.92MiB 130k https │ audio only opus 130k 48k medium, webm_dash 233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 234 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 140 m4a audio only 2 │ 3.90MiB 129k https │ audio only mp4a.40.2 129k 44k medium, m4a_dashYouTube already has access to the audio for that song without any additional effort because of how YouTube works. I'm sure publishers can provide higher quality audio, up to 256Kbps but that option isn't even enabled for users by default. By default you're listening to "normal" audio or 130Kbps: https://i.xno.dev/Ow2eC.png
The reason why YouTube Music works is because they already have access to a huge library of music through music videos and the like. They save a ton of time and money by doing things this way and it makes perfect sense that they do...
It's less supported, and for me mp3 is largely enough. Can fit a lot of them on my 20€ 128GB usb key...
I mean, I'm sure that it is less supported, but in all the years I've been using it I haven't found one. 🤷♂️
I got back into using soulseek and have mp3s on my phone and on my pc. I find it rewarding for privacy and offline reliability purposes. Not to mention it’s free.
Well, most of my music collection lies as mp3. I care about metadata and all of them have tags. I would love to convert my collection to opus but first I need FLACs and an easy way to move over metadata, since vorbis is different than ID3tag. Do you know a streamlined way for this?
For FLAC you have torrents, no legal way to have that. For tags I use https://beets.io/ but it's not moving tags, it's detection and looking up on a database on the internet.
I 100% do. I think mp3 is a good compromise of sound and space. It's also the format I'm used to. Just like how people swear by physical record. If I'm at a get together and hear mp3 quality, I'm at home.
That being said, I have my absolute favorites in flac for my iPod 5th gen video I rebuilt. The 5th gen's dac, Wolfson, is a solid little dac for the day and age. Got Rockbox loaded up and I'm ace, but I've hard saved all the Apple firmware for every model in case the time came to sell them. Old iPods could be an investment someday and I own every gen in multiples.
Still care about MP3- it's the bog standard, the thing EVERYthing supports. Like the shitty SBC codec on Bluetooth. I've still got tons of MP3s and they aren't going away anytime soon.
Everything I get new though is high-res FLAC.
Sure, it's like JPG.
It may not be the newest or best compression ratio, but it works, and even the shittiest old hardware supports it. And I know it won't whine about licences being missing or some shit.
It's still my preferred format. Everything can play it. At 256kbit or better it sounds fine for usual listening.
Even at 160kbps, maybe 1/1.000.000 people can recognice a FLAC vs MP3 trying 10 times (continuous) using expensive headphones and players, 320kbps is overkill, I prefer a FLAC and just encode to Opus.
Right now Opus is better and can be played in web browsers, smartphones, YouTube and Netflix are using that for awhile.
No doubt there are many superior codecs. Opus is amazing, we use it for voice and video over IP. But I doubt anything will ever be as universally playable as MP3.
I listen to mp3 all the time. Back in the Napster days I collected a ton of music, but moreover I'm a fan of Old Time Radio from the 30s and 40s, so I accumulated around 10,000 of those shows. More than I'll ever have time to listen to. Audiophiles may deride the quality level, but I don't believe in letting perfection be the enemy of good. And even if "computers" - whatever that even means anymore lol - drop support for mp3, there will always be software that plays it as long as there are people with big collections of files they don't want to take the trouble to convert to something else.
I freaking love old time radio, that stuff is great!
That sounds fascinating. If I were interested in those shows, where would I start? Are there at least some that are easily listenable to on the open internet?
Check out the many OTR Gold podcasts that have the serialized shows as episodes.
Biggest free download site is probably https://www.oldradioworld.com/
There's also the Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
If you like sci-fi I highly recommend X Minus One - https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/X_Minus_One.php
The man with the action packed expense account.
I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there's no reason not to support the format.
MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I've been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven't ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)
Yeah it works. What's the deal? You've got mp3s and then you got flac if you're audiophile.
MP3 320kbps gang rise up!
I remember reading articles at the time of the last patents running out. Some were so misguided it was hilarious.
They called it the death of MP3! As if patents were good or necessary, instead of restrictive and troublesome for interoperability.
About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn't grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and......get this......forked it! gasp!
Still to this day, I don't see how Winamp didn't see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn't even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!
Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.
Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let's take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID "HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???"
So that doesn't seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.
Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don't know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what's the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don't have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I'm not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.
So, if it wasn't them being blundering idiots, and it wasn't them deliberately doing this.......what the fuck DID happen?
My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.
Always remember that in some places executive just means the dumbest person in the room and most developers won't lift a finger if it means they get to see the owners embarrassing themselves in public.
So, if it wasn't them being blundering idiots, and it wasn't them deliberately doing this.......what the fuck DID happen?
An error in the simulation, probably.
My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.
Ogg at lower bitrates sounded better than mp3 at the same rate. Consumers dont care, but for a lot of game developers the zero patent risk and higher quality shipping with smaller files made Ogg a great choice at the time.
For me? FLACs are the only way.... which reminds me, I wonder I can still convert all the SHN (shorten) lossless files I still have. I should get on that before a converter doesn't exist.
Apple basically killed any chance ogg had by not supporting it on ipods. Which was unfortunate.
There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something "good enough" that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.
Most people are archiving in FLAC but the reality is that almost nobody can hear the difference between 320 (or even V0) and FLAC. So in cases where the disk space makes a difference mp3 still makes sense.
You can easily hear the difference if you have good headphones or speakers
I care, because I’ve been using streaming media for quite a few years years and not kept up with any changes
I use m4a format simply because my downloader uses that format. But I think m4a sound quality is better than mp3.
m4a
That's mp4, which is 33% better than mp3 /j
yt-dlp uses m4a but sometimes I like my library to be mo3 just for nostalgia :(
I haven’t looked into this so deeply in a while. Thanks for the post! I use VLC, precisely because it plays most anything I throw at it. Cell coverage is spotty, so it’s common to play from files rather than stream. We have a bike ride, doubtless like many cities, social ride meets on the regular. Since Bluetooth, and everyone has a speaker. When I’m riding solo it lets people know I’m coming. Safer that way. I’ve heard people complain they don’t care to hear that cyclists taste in music, which tells me you heard them and weren’t harmed. You’ll hear that music, for a moment, and safely continue on your way. On the group ride everyone plays their own music, call it The Cacophony, if you will. Sometimes the music to the left, to the right match up in interesting ways.
You've never heard about bicycle bells, have you?
Perhaps you have heard of people stepping out from behind a bush, unaware that there was an approaching cyclist because that cyclist didn’t realize that there was a need to ring the bell? Have you ever noticed when you phrase a question with a negative assumption it tends to affect how the person responds to that question? Communication takes practice, and with practice can improve over time. I believe in you, and think you have the ability to improve.
Mp3 has been dead to me for nearly a decade. Flac is superior in every way.
Except file size. 😁 I convert everything from flac to mp3 before I put it on my phone. I'm lucky in that I can't tell the difference in quality at all.
It's just one of those things where once you hear the difference you can't go back. It's sort of the difference between a 360p vs 1440p youtube video. The compression artifacts make the music sound so artifical to me. I don't really know how to describe it. But yes, there is a considerable increase in file size. For me it's a non issue because I have my music collection on an 8tb hdd. Though I wish phones still had micro sd slots so I could take them with me. My music collection is at 1.2 tb I think. I'm not trying to be an elitist asshole here. I'm just sharing my experience.
@daggermoon Ogg is actually my preference, but so much stuff still doesn’t support it these days.
Yeah only the most popular formats are guaranteed support sadly. Support seems to be relegated to formats that are 20+ years old.
Edit: Just realized vorbis is 24 years old. Nevermind lol.
Since it appears this happened 8 years ago, and uh, I can't say that I've seen a single MP3 file since then, perhaps nobody still cares.
If you're building a music library, and you're NOT using some sort of lossless format, I'd love to know why. I know a lot of people with massive libraries, medium libraries, and just shit they like one song at a time and not a one of them isn't using FLAC files for it.
They might transcode into something occasionally, but it's always something like AAC or OPUS, not MP3.
Because I don't want it to take up too much space? My phone has a ton of storage but I would still rather not spend tons of it at a time...
If you’re building a music library, and you’re NOT using some sort of lossless format, I’d love to know why.
Because MP3 is the only thing my car stereo, my wife’s car stereo and my daughter’s book shelf system will reliably read. Sometimes they’ll work with an m4a, but it’s hit or miss.
Now I always rip to FLAC & MP3, but other than local listening, it tends to be all MP3’s that get used.
but you could just throw away your car and build an open source car from source! isn't that better than using... MP3!?!?!
/j
Yeah, i have a huge archive of music in .mp3 format and it keeps growing. There is no appreciable loss in quality between uncompressed and 320kb/s, with the potential to go reasonably lower depending on the source quality.
I'm like this with my movies too, with some exceptions all 2000 of them are around 1-2Gb in size, which is considered small in the torrenting community. For those ones i can actually notice the low image quality, but it kinda doesn't bother me.
I have good headphones and a good TV, i just stopped believing in high fidelity. People adore the imperfections of vinyl and VHS media, and i kind of feel the same way towards digital artifacts, movies feel weird when the image is too sharp. For music, again, i don't even notice.
In this context, if a format can cut my library size in half and i can't tell the audio difference, AND it's patent-free, i see this as an absolute win.
Not that most people would care anyway, in the age of streaming people don't have libraries anymore
understandable if you mainly have moved to streaming apps, but if you dj as a hobby or pro you have a healthy collection of mp3s, wavs and maybe flacs. there is a lot of hobby and pro djs around the world for sure !
My top headset is worth like $280 AUD, which isn't much for Bluetooth, soossless is kinda worthless. I don't have top end equipment for me to notice literally any kind of difference.
Also something that effects me but probably not most people, I have like 400 songs downloaded, to do that in MP3 is hours, lossless has to be way way more than that.
I built my MP3 collection from 1998 to now and I have been steadily replacing old, low quality MP3s with FLACs.
Yeah there isn't a good reason for MP3s anymore. Maybe if suddenly storage space is an issue again in the future.
Soulseek is a goldmine of high quality FLACs.
