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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Much like GIFs, MP3s will never go away.
Sure there are better alternatives, but widespread adoption over decades now is hard to gloss over.
Not being encumbered by patents is a huge advantage for MP3s going forward, and the reality is that MP3 is good enough for vast majority of situations. The improvements newer formats like AAC bring are not worth the trouble of being chained to a proprietary format.
There's always Opus.
Sure, but is there any practical benefit using Opus given that MP3 is much more widely implemented?
Much better quality for the same bitrate and it's supported pretty much everywhere too.
I was a flac snob when I was younger, and I can say with certainty: 320kbps mp3s or even VBR are indistinguishable from opus or even lossless except when listening very very very closely on high end hardware. I'm very into audio still and production etc. That's not to say opus isn't better or higher quality, but the difference it makes is decidedly negligible to the vast majority of listeners. I guarantee that almost everyone would fail to do better than a coin flip a/b testing these technologies on the same audio recording.
192kbps opus will allow you to achieve roughly the same quality as 320kbps mp3. If you stream your music from any device or have a larger collection this difference can matter a lot.
I guess my collection's just not big enough for this to have become an issue.
As a music producer, you notice 192k MP3. The next jumps you probably don't notice. I'm still a flac snob because I have to work a lot with original quality files, but for the average users there's probably not even a difference between MP3 192k+ and flac or wav or opus or whatever.
AAC-LC is patent free too nowadays (not HE-AAC, but that's mainly useful for low-bitrate stuff).
good to know
Same with H264. I still have trouble getting H265 videos to play on all devices, so it's easier to stay with 264.
Pretty much everything plays AAC though (unless it's some cheap mp3 player)
So long as people use high bitrates, I'm fine with that.
What is considered a high bitrate? There isn't much reason to go higher than 320 kb/s on an mp3.
Anything over 190 is just fine for me.
I'm not sure you can go more than 320kb/s on mp3. I have my music collection on my home server in FLAC but I transcode to 320kbps constant bitrate mp3 for my car and phone. I chose 320 because it's the highest that I've seen mp3 converters able to go.
Good point. I guess there is a reason that is the highest setting.
Basically it goes a little like this... I bounce out a song as a WAV, and then convert it to a 320 MP3 using iTunes. iTunes compresses very well (imo), and so if you compare that WAV with that 320, they will sound practically identical. I then take that 320 and Convert it to 128 in iTunes. The sound is STILL practically identical. (Because it is a good 128.) There may be a little rolloff around 8-10k (super high end) but it's more of a "sound change" than a "degradation". This conception that 128's are drastically inferior to 320's mostly comes from 1. people reading bullshit on the internet, & 2. people downloading BAD 128's!!!! Seriously. Not every WAV is equal, not every 320 is equal. I could take something at 92 KBPS and rebounce it as a WAV. does that make it a lossless audio file? Fuck no. Who knows how many times it' been downconverted/upconverted etc. Just because you downloaded a rip on /xtrill and its a 128 and it sounds bad doesn't mean 128's sound bad. Just because the apple I bought was rotten doesn't mean all apples taste awful. Basically if I listen to a song and it sounds good, I will play it. People knock me for playing 128's and I'm just like... If I can't tell the difference, then neither can you. And the bit about playing it on big systems and it sounding like shit is also a load of crap. TL;DR: If it sounds good on good headphones, play it. (That said, anything below 128 and you will notice audio quality deteriorate VERY quickly.)
Sorry, are you converting it, lossily, twice? That's like twice the lossiness! Just convert it once.
128kbps mp3?
my ears are bleeding
As someone who grew up with mp3 and is currently replacing it with opus, o7
(IK theres flac, but bruh...storage is expensive and my equipment isn't like state of the art)
I did the same. Faced a problem where mp3 and opus replaygain tags follow different spec (replaygain calculators for some reason use R128_ tags for opus files for some reason) and some players don't support it yet. Apart from that there haven't been issues.
And MP3s are perfectly adequate for most applications.