Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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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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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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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.
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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.
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No, they're not sure. You're correct.
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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.
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no such luck for me there. the music is in /artist/album directories. I had considered flattening it all out to see if that makes a difference.
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It's less supported, and for me mp3 is largely enough. Can fit a lot of them on my 20€ 128GB usb key...
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I agree with that to a certain extent, but computer classes (at least where I grew up) weren't very comprehensive or germane to the skills people are talking about in this thread. If I think back, in elementary school we mostly had a few educational programs (typing, spelling, oregon trail, etc), and in middle school we did some stuff with excel and I'm sure some other things I'm forgetting, but we definitely didn't have anything about how computers fundamentally worked. Maybe there was some very simple coding in basic, but it would've been very limited.
The reason I learned how to mess around with files and things was because computers simply weren't very easy to use. Trying to get games running when they didn't work just out of the box was a great teaching tool. Early on you had to learn the DOS commands (which by necessity meant learning file menus), and in windows (I can't speak to anything Mac related) before plug and play worked well there was still endless tinkering you had to do with config files. Like you get the game installed but the sound doesn't work, so you have to edit the config files to try different channels for your soundblaster. Or maybe your new printer won't print, so you have to search online for the dll files you need.
There just stopped being a need to learn how to do anything like that, so the functioning of computers became that much less understood. I agree that the whole digital native narrative was dumb and hurt children's learning (if anything the generation who dealt with the problems outline above are much closer to digital "natives"), and there's a ton of stuff computer classes should be teaching these days. But classes will always only be effective in a limited capacity compared to learning about something because you need or want it to work for you in your life outside of school.
