Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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I'd argue you've got that backwards; CD is to vinyl what lossless is to .mp3. That said, I know what you mean.
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I should add that I have a hackish python script for that conversion. It basically mirrors the tree of MP3s and FLAC files, converting the FLACs and hard linking everything else. So it doesn't use too much more disk. Then I copy that to my phone. I could put it up somewhere if it would be useful.
But I don't have as much music as you, either.
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IIRC that era of iPods had issues with their preamps. I remember when I switched from a Nano to a classic that there was noticeable clipping and other distortion where there wasn't before. I would have returned it but I had already sold my Nano...
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A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.
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Opus is better in every way
Except ubiquitousness.
I can play an MP3 on any digital audio device made in the last 20 years.
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I think most of the tools have a way to download content, the issue is no one does or has a system for their backups. Which is the risk with the cloud, you're putting all your eggs in someone elses basket.
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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.
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Ye, when outdoors in my wireless headphones, I won't even hear the difference.
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Seems to confirm the tendency, except I was thinking about higher-end and more professional systems.
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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.
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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.
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I would guess that at least part of the issue there is also that the data isn't all that useful unless it's also exported to some format that other software can read. That format may not capture everything that the native format stores.
In another comment in this thread, I was reading the article on Adobe Creative Cloud, which commented on the fact that the format is proprietary. I can set up some "data storage service", and maybe Adobe lets users export their Creative Cloud data there. Maybe users even have local storage.
But...then, what do you do with the data? Suppose I just get a copy of the native format. If nothing other than the software on Adobe's servers can use it, that doesn't help me at all. Maybe you can export the data, export to an open format like a PNG or something, but you probably don't retain everything. Like, I can maybe get my final image out, but I don't get all the project workflow stuff associated with the work I've done. Macros, brushes, stuff broken up into layers, undo history...
I mean, you have to have the ability to use the software to maintain full use of the data, and Adobe's not going to give you that.
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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.
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I don't use any one format. No idea what audio formats I have but probably a lot. Never cared, VLC takes them all.
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Oh, yeah, not saying that they were the first filesystems, just that I can remember that transition on the personal computer.
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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 gear being used to listen to the recording.
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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.
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PNG is really designed for images that are either flat color or use an ordered dither. I mean, we do use it for photographs because it's everywhere and lossless, but it was never really intended to compress photographs well.
There are formats that do aim for that, like lossless JPEG and one of the WebP variants.
TIFF also has some utility in that it's got some sort of hierarchical variant that's useful for efficiently dealing with extremely-large images, where software that deals with most other formats really falls over.
But none of those are as universally-available.
Also, I suppose that if you have a PNG image, you know that -- well, absent something like color reduction -- it was losslessly-compressed, whereas all of the above have lossless and lossy variants.
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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.
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Definitely not.
