Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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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
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Even at 160kbps, maybe 1/1.000.000 people can recognice a FLAC vs MP3 trying 10 times (continuous) using expensive headphones and players, 320kbps is overkill, I prefer a FLAC and just encode to Opus.
Right now Opus is better and can be played in web browsers, smartphones, YouTube and Netflix are using that for awhile.
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You might not have heard of the formats but you've definitely listened to them. For example, Youtube has only served audio in aac and opus for years now. Most instant messaging apps also use opus during calls to reduce bandwidth usage. And those are just some big examples. Basically almost any online service has dumped mp3 in favor of aac and opus since they're better in every way (in the sense that they have better quality at the same bitrate as mp3)
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You can easily hear the difference if you have good headphones or speakers
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No doubt there are many superior codecs. Opus is amazing, we use it for voice and video over IP. But I doubt anything will ever be as universally playable as MP3.
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I'm not arguing in the slightest that FLAC shows an audible difference in most cases for most tracks. However, it just makes sense as an archival format given it's lossless which means you can transcode to any other format without generational loss.
This means if there is a massive breakthrough in lossy compression in the future, I can use it for mobile purposes. If you store as lossy, you're stuck with whatever losses have been incurred.
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Apple basically killed any chance ogg had by not supporting it on ipods. Which was unfortunate.
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Well it would hardly be the cyclist fault if pedestrians and others don't pay attention to their surroundings?
I don't see that as a legitimate reason to be a noise complaint.
