Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
-
My top headset is worth like $280 AUD, which isn't much for Bluetooth, soossless is kinda worthless. I don't have top end equipment for me to notice literally any kind of difference.
Also something that effects me but probably not most people, I have like 400 songs downloaded, to do that in MP3 is hours, lossless has to be way way more than that.
-
If you’re building a music library, and you’re NOT using some sort of lossless format, I’d love to know why.
Because MP3 is the only thing my car stereo, my wife’s car stereo and my daughter’s book shelf system will reliably read. Sometimes they’ll work with an m4a, but it’s hit or miss.
Now I always rip to FLAC & MP3, but other than local listening, it tends to be all MP3’s that get used.
-
-
There are better lossy formats, like opus.
But MP3 still has its place as it's supported everywhere.
-
The main benefit to lossless is for archival purposes. I can transcode to any format (such as on mobile) without generational quality loss.
And it means if a better lossy format comes out in the future, I can use that without issue.
-
-
Podcasts are almost exclusively mp3. There is no need for lossless fidelity on those. And when you are subscribed to 200 podcasts like I am a small file size matters. And when listening at 2.5x speed lossless is a complete waste.
-
Well they have the skulls on them. They must be good!
-
About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn't grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and......get this......forked it! gasp!
Still to this day, I don't see how Winamp didn't see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn't even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!
Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.
Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let's take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID "HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???"
So that doesn't seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.
Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don't know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what's the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don't have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I'm not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.
So, if it wasn't them being blundering idiots, and it wasn't them deliberately doing this.......what the fuck DID happen?
My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.
-
All my podcasts appear to use the AAC spoken audio profile? It’s much smaller and cleaner than MPEG layer 3 audio.
-
I owned Adobe CS 4. CS 5 and 6 had nothing new I needed. When my OS no longer supported CS 4, I purchased Affinity Suite; it still works great with no subscription or cloud hosting.
Back when the iTunes Music Store still existed, I took advantage of their feature to convert my library of audio to digitally mastered DRM-free 256 bit AAC. All my recordings of tapes and LPs replaced by professionally remastered tracks. Since then, I’ve supplemented with tracks purchased directly from the bands I’m interested in, plus some lower value stuff from YouTube.
In fact, the only cloud service I depend on is NextCloud, which I host myself, and which lives behind a VPN.
I run my own JellyFin server with all my DVD rips hosted on it. That’s a large part of my streaming video that I’d want to watch more than once.
Probably not a huge number of people do what I do, but enough to keep people employed who still make products you download once and enjoy forever.
-
This was actually something I found interesting with the brief TikTok shutdown in the US. A lot of creators only had their content in the editing software owned by TikTok or the app itself, meaning they lost access to all of their content.
The biggest risk of cloud only setups is you don't own it.
-
Apple broke metadata compatibility with a recent update. The podcast producer I know with an explicit AAC feed decided to just redirect to the MP3 feed. Unrelated to that, they also increased the MP3 bitrate for better audio quality. The increased file size doesn't really matter that much compared to 15 years ago and people without unlimited data can just set their automated syncs to WiFi only.
-
but you could just throw away your car and build an open source car from source! isn't that better than using... MP3!?!?!
/j
-
I wouldn't expect most users to understand how to use it, but has there not been a tiktok downloader made yet? If not that's a good opportunity for someone looking for a project.
-
I hear you for sure. I very much prefer local software and saved files local as well. The problem is there's more money to be made doing it the other way. Unless it's FOSS you can pretty much count on the company to follow the money.
-
Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.
-
-
Godamn this made my job feel secure
-
I am very slightly annoyed that people haven't moved onto Opus which gives you better compression and quality than MP3. MP3s are still useful for any older devices that have hardware decoding like radio sets, handheld players, etc. Otherwise, every modern device should support Opus out of box.
Hilariously, x264 has the same problem where there are direct upgrades with H.265 and AV1, but the usage is still low due to lack of hardware accelerated encoding (especially AV1), but like everyone uses FLAC for the audio which is lossless lol.
