Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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I meant - before Unix.
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I'm in the same boat: can't hear any difference.
But, I have GBs of 320k MP3s... is it worth converting to Ogg ?
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I'm a big fan ogg opus, but I wouldn't convert between lossy formats
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This is what we were all told for years and years- that it was impossible that anyone could hear anything in vinyl that was supposed to be there but that couldn't be reproduced with digital at cd quality. Then DVD came out And people could genuinely hear the difference from CD quality audio even in stereo. It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.
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Yeah only the most popular formats are guaranteed support sadly. Support seems to be relegated to formats that are 20+ years old.
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I am under 30, and I have interacted with music files.
edit: I don't know about where you live, but I am definitely not the exception.
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192kbps variable mp3 on my 64MB mp3 player...
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I mean, I'm sure that it is less supported, but in all the years I've been using it I haven't found one.
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It's still my preferred format. Everything can play it. At 256kbit or better it sounds fine for usual listening.
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Youtube Music doesn’t just serve the audio from a video.
Yes it does. You don't even need to take my word for it. Look up any song by any artist and find their official video for that song. Take this one as an example: https://youtu.be/kPa7bsKwL-c
Analyze it with yt-dlp or something similar;
249 webm audio only 2 │ 1.51MiB 50k https │ audio only opus 50k 48k low, webm_dash 250 webm audio only 2 │ 2.00MiB 67k https │ audio only opus 67k 48k low, webm_dash 251 webm audio only 2 │ 3.92MiB 130k https │ audio only opus 130k 48k medium, webm_dash 233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 234 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 140 m4a audio only 2 │ 3.90MiB 129k https │ audio only mp4a.40.2 129k 44k medium, m4a_dash
YouTube already has access to the audio for that song without any additional effort because of how YouTube works. I'm sure publishers can provide higher quality audio, up to 256Kbps but that option isn't even enabled for users by default. By default you're listening to "normal" audio or 130Kbps: https://i.xno.dev/Ow2eC.png
The reason why YouTube Music works is because they already have access to a huge library of music through music videos and the like. They save a ton of time and money by doing things this way and it makes perfect sense that they do...
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Workarounds in a specific player don't negate the fact that the format has limitations.
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The man with the action packed expense account.
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I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there's no reason not to support the format.
MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I've been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven't ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)
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That’s a great idea, especially since I’m also trying to purge old stuff
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It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.
Dynamic range isn't limited by the sampling rate. It is limited by the resolution, which is 16 bits for the audio CD. With that resolution you get a dynamic range of 96 dB when not using any dithering and even more than that when using dithering. Even with "only" 96 dB that dynamic range is so vast, that there is no practical use of a higher resolution when it comes to playback. I know that the human ear is supposed to be able to handle 130 dB or even more of dynamic range. The thing is, you can only experience such a dynamic range once, afterwards you are deaf. So not much point in such a dynamic range there.
There are good reasons to use a higher resolution when recording and mixing audio, but for playback and storage of the finished audio 16 bits of resolution is just fine.
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It is my admittedly limited understanding that we really can't do better at digitally recording an audio signal than how red book audio does it, such that the microphones, amplifiers, ADCs etc on the recording end and the DAC, amp and speakers on the playback end are going to be much more significant factors in audio quality.
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You're absolutely right a out data formatting being an issue and something that really does cause vendor lockin.
I would just think content creators would still want archive/backup of the final products (the video itself). For example could you imagine if a movie just disappeared because Adobe or someone shutdown.
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As I said, some of the music is just the audio of a video, but they also get a lot of releases directly from the publishers. They are both on YT Music and the difference in quality in between them is noticeable.
I have my audio quality set to high in that options menu btw.
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Sure, it's like JPG.
It may not be the newest or best compression ratio, but it works, and even the shittiest old hardware supports it. And I know it won't whine about licences being missing or some shit.
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Biggest free download site is probably https://www.oldradioworld.com/
There's also the Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio