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.
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.)
It’s still my preferred format. Everything can play it. At 256kbit or better it sounds fine for usual listening.
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.
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.
… I’m out of the loop. Why don’t people care about mp3s?
Its mostly been superseded by AAC, Opus and FLAC.
Mhmm I haven’t heard of the first two. I still listen to mp3s that I got from the 90s.
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.
I’m in the same boat: can’t hear any difference.
But, I have GBs of 320k MP3s… is it worth converting to Ogg ?
I’m a big fan ogg opus, but I wouldn’t convert between lossy formats
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.
The man with the action packed expense account.
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.
I freaking love old time radio, that stuff is great!
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.
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.
Aren’t there unofficial extensions to mp3 for gappless playback? IIRC you can tag tracks as gappless and many audio players will make them so.
Aren’t there unofficial extensions to mp3 for gappless playback?
Yes and no.
IIRC an MP3 track is divided in fixed-length frames and unless the actual audio matches perfectly with the end of a frame, it’s not possible and that’s why cross-fading plugins for audio players were invented. The padding data is there either way but can be documented in the metadata section of a file.
Last I checked (and that was years ago, so I may be wrong) this approach was never perfect and prone to breaking. It’s an inherent flaw with the format where some form of workaround exists.
That said, for most use cases this is irrelevant.
Audio playback is such a low-demand process, surely a player (e.g.VLC) can spare a thread to line up playback of track 2, a few seconds before track 1 ends? It knows the exact length of the track, why can’t track 2 be initiated when the audio level in track 1 drops to zero (or minus infinity dB) in the last frame?
Workarounds in a specific player don’t negate the fact that the format has limitations.
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.
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.
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.
Dynamic range isn’t limited by the sampling rate. It is limited by the resolution, which is 16 bits for the audio CD. With that resolution you get a dynamic range of 96 dB when not using any dithering and even more than that when using dithering. Even with “only” 96 dB that dynamic range is so vast, that there is no practical use of a higher resolution when it comes to playback. I know that the human ear is supposed to be able to handle 130 dB or even more of dynamic range. The thing is, you can only experience such a dynamic range once, afterwards you are deaf. So not much point in such a dynamic range there.
There are good reasons to use a higher resolution when recording and mixing audio, but for playback and storage of the finished audio 16 bits of resolution is just fine.
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.
The Nyquist limit?
You need sampling at twice the frequency as a minimum to extract a time domain signal into the frequency domain. It says nothing about “perfect” especially when you’re listening in the time domain.
There is a lot of data in the time domain that impacts sound/signal quality. As others have said though, it probably doesn’t matter without high quality equipment and a good ear.
It’s also good to note that you can train your hearing. A musician or producer or audiophile are going to hear things and qualities you don’t. It’s edge cases though, and generally irrelevant to regular listening.
You definitely can hear the difference between MP3 320 and lower mp3 bitrates though.
It is my admittedly limited understanding that we really can’t do better at digitally recording an audio signal than how red book audio does it, such that the microphones, amplifiers, ADCs etc on the recording end and the DAC, amp and speakers on the playback end are going to be much more significant factors in audio quality.
You need sampling at twice the frequency as a minimum to extract a time domain signal into the frequency domain. It says nothing about “perfect” especially when you’re listening in the time domain.
Yes it does. You can use a higher frequency, but that does not change anything except increase the maxiumum frequency possible. Even with perfect ears and the best equipment, there is no audible (and mathematical) difference to be had.
Everyone who claims otherwise should watch Monty’s explainer videos. I know they are quite old at this point, but everything he explains is still perfectly valid. If that does not convince you, nothing will.
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.
I’d argue you’ve got that backwards; CD is to vinyl what lossless is to .mp3. That said, I know what you mean.
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!
240 VBR was the sweet spot when drive space was expensive. Now I use flac lossless for things I care about.
192kbps variable mp3 on my 64MB mp3 player…
Might be a controversial opinion but I don’t think there’s a discernible difference between 320kbps mp3s and FLACs, and one of them takes up a fraction of the storage space. I have a pair of “audiophile” headphones and I can’t tell between them at all.
Yes. People forget that regardless of the technical differences between them ultimately it is your ears that have to listen to them and I doubt the average person can really tell the difference.
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
Find somewhere that accepts/generates ewaste and you might be able to score an internal CD/DVD drives. We were doing some reorganizing at work and I saw a literal box full of 5.25" drives
That’s a great idea, especially since I’m also trying to purge old stuff
You can buy an external drive that plays both CD and DVD
I don’t use any one format. No idea what audio formats I have but probably a lot. Never cared, VLC takes them all.
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.
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.
Doesn’t the iPod use AAC?
iPhones use m4a these days for their native music app.
Sure, but they used AAC to rocket to success, not MP3. In fact, it was annoying back in the day because everything non-apple used MP3.
Aren’t AAC and m4a the same codec in different containers?
It’s really confusing.
The .m4a extension is commonly used for audio only MP4 (container) files. m4a files are capable of carrying other audio codecs other than AAC.
The .acc extension seems to mean very little. It indicates that the file contains a AAC stream but the container is not defined. Could be MP4, could be 3GP could be a raw AAC stream.
The concept of file extensions really break down when it comes to audio and video files. A single media file could contain a dozen audio streams in a dozen formats.
webm files really are nothing but mkv files in which the audio/video codecs are limited to a certain subset. You can “convert” a webm to a mkv by renaming the file.
The concept of file extensions really break down when it comes to audio and video files
Honestly anywhere other than windows they start getting a bit funky since most ecosystems don’t actually rely on the filename to determine the file type
It also doesn’t help that so many file types are just a bunch of text files shoved into a zip file wearing a mask. It’s all abstractions all the way down baby!
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
