Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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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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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
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You've never heard about bicycle bells, have you?
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And Mazda 3. The platforms are the same but engines and interiors a lot different between the Fords and the Mazdas at least.
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I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories),
That is true for MS-DOS 1.0. But Unix had a tree structured directory system from the very beginning (early 1970s). And the directory listing command "ls" was basically the same in the first Unix 50 years ago as it is in modern Linux.
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Audio playback is such a low-demand process, surely a player (e.g.VLC) can spare a thread to line up playback of track 2, a few seconds before track 1 ends? It knows the exact length of the track, why can't track 2 be initiated when the audio level in track 1 drops to zero (or minus infinity dB) in the last frame?
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240 VBR was the sweet spot when drive space was expensive. Now I use flac lossless for things I care about.
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CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There's a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can't record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won't work.
It's functionally impossible to improve on "red book" CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround...Stereo.) It's why there really hasn't been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80's and still is.
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Ubiquitousness is not an aspect of the codec, let alone a technical one. It's yet another failure of capitalism.
