Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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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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Aren’t AAC and m4a the same codec in different containers?
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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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Yeah it works. What's the deal? You've got mp3s and then you got flac if you're audiophile.
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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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MP3 320kbps gang rise up!
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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.
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I haven’t looked into this so deeply in a while. Thanks for the post! I use VLC, precisely because it plays most anything I throw at it. Cell coverage is spotty, so it’s common to play from files rather than stream. We have a bike ride, doubtless like many cities, social ride meets on the regular. Since Bluetooth, and everyone has a speaker. When I’m riding solo it lets people know I’m coming. Safer that way. I’ve heard people complain they don’t care to hear that cyclists taste in music, which tells me you heard them and weren’t harmed. You’ll hear that music, for a moment, and safely continue on your way. On the group ride everyone plays their own music, call it The Cacophony, if you will. Sometimes the music to the left, to the right match up in interesting ways.
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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 for my purposes it's totally fine.
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True. All my devices support it, but many older ones may not.
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I personally can't hear any difference with 96kbps Opus.
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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.
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I freaking love old time radio, that stuff is great!
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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 to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.
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I use m4a format simply because my downloader uses that format. But I think m4a sound quality is better than mp3.
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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.
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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.
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yt-dlp uses m4a but sometimes I like my library to be mo3 just for nostalgia
