Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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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.
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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.
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I've never seen a single flac file in the wild in the last eight years. You have to look specifically for them.
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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 !
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My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are better lossy formats, like opus.
But MP3 still has its place as it's supported everywhere.
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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.
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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.
