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.
Anyone telling you they can hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and lossless audio is full of shit, anyway. It’s still a great format for keeping file sizes small, though I prefer ogg these days.
I’m in the same boat: can’t hear any difference.
But, I have GBs of 320k MP3s… is it worth converting to Ogg ?
I’m a big fan ogg opus, but I wouldn’t convert between lossy formats
Since it appears this happened 8 years ago, and uh, I can’t say that I’ve seen a single MP3 file since then, perhaps nobody still cares.
If you’re building a music library, and you’re NOT using some sort of lossless format, I’d love to know why. I know a lot of people with massive libraries, medium libraries, and just shit they like one song at a time and not a one of them isn’t using FLAC files for it.
They might transcode into something occasionally, but it’s always something like AAC or OPUS, not MP3.
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Plex. I’ve had my whole personal collection available to stream for a long time now.
I only waste space with downloaded tracks if I know my drive is going to take me offline.
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How? It’s never failed me once. It’s literally just like Spotify except my own collection.
There’s a reason I don’t use Spotify. Well, there are multiple reasons I don’t use Spotify, but one of them is because I live in an area where stable cell tower connections aren’t a given.
Store the original library as FLAC, then transcode on-the-fly (or once if you don’t want to use something like Navidrome or Jellyfin).
This is pure elitism refusing to see another point of view though. FLAC is an excellent format, but it is a format that doesn’t meet everyone’s needs.
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I built my MP3 collection from 1998 to now and I have been steadily replacing old, low quality MP3s with FLACs.
Yeah there isn’t a good reason for MP3s anymore. Maybe if suddenly storage space is an issue again in the future.
understandable if you mainly have moved to streaming apps, but if you dj as a hobby or pro you have a healthy collection of mp3s, wavs and maybe flacs. there is a lot of hobby and pro djs around the world for sure !
I’ve never seen a single flac file in the wild in the last eight years. You have to look specifically for them.
Wav files are far more common than flacc.
Have you ever used Bandcamp before?
No
Yeah, i have a huge archive of music in .mp3 format and it keeps growing. There is no appreciable loss in quality between uncompressed and 320kb/s, with the potential to go reasonably lower depending on the source quality.
I’m like this with my movies too, with some exceptions all 2000 of them are around 1-2Gb in size, which is considered small in the torrenting community. For those ones i can actually notice the low image quality, but it kinda doesn’t bother me.
I have good headphones and a good TV, i just stopped believing in high fidelity. People adore the imperfections of vinyl and VHS media, and i kind of feel the same way towards digital artifacts, movies feel weird when the image is too sharp. For music, again, i don’t even notice.
In this context, if a format can cut my library size in half and i can’t tell the audio difference, AND it’s patent-free, i see this as an absolute win.
Not that most people would care anyway, in the age of streaming people don’t have libraries anymore
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.
but you could just throw away your car and build an open source car from source! isn’t that better than using… MP3!!!
/j
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.
My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.
The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats.
I remember someone saying that and me having a hard time believing it, but I’ve seen several people say that.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1dkeiwz/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_computers/
The OS interfaces have followed this trend, by developing OS that are more similar to a smartphone design (Windows 8 was the first great example of this). And everything became more user-friendly (my 65+ yo parents barely know how to turn on a computer, but now, use apps for the bank and send emails from their phone). The combined result is that the younger generations have never learned the basic of how a computer works (file structure, file installation…) and are not very comfortable with the PC setup (how they prefer to keep their notes on the phone makes me confused).
So the “kids” do not need to know these things for their daily enjoyment life (play videogames, watch videos, messaging… all stuff that required some basic computer skills even just 10 years ago, but now can be done much more easily, I still remember having to install some bulky pc game with 3 discs) and we nobody is teaching them because the people in charge thought “well the kids know this computer stuff better than us” so no more courses in elementary school on how to install ms word.
For a while I was convinced my students were screwing with me but no, many of them actually do not know the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste. If it’s not tablet/phone centric, they’re probably not familiar with it.
Also, most have used GSuite through school and were restricted from adding anything to their Chrome Books. They’ve used integrated sites, not applications that need downloading. They’re also adept at Web 3.0, creation stuff, more than professional type programs.
As much as boomers don’t know how to use PCs because they were too new for them, GenZs and later are not particularly computer savvy because computers are too old for them.
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame. If one is going to consume content, okay, fine. Like, as a TV replacement or something, sure. But there’s a huge range of software – including most of what I’d use for “serious” tasks – out there that doesn’t fall into that class, and really doesn’t follow that model. Statistics software? Software development? CAD? I guess Microsoft 365 – which I have not used – probably has some kind of cloud-based spreadsheet stuff. I haven’t used Adobe Creative Cloud, but I assume that it must have some kind of functionality analogous to Photoshop.
kagis
Looks like off-line Photoshop is dead these days, and Adobe shifted to a pure SaaS model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Criticism
Shifting to a software as a service model, Adobe announced more frequent feature updates to its products and the eschewing of their traditional release cycles.[26] Customers must pay a monthly subscription fee. Consequently, if subscribers cancel or stop paying, they will lose access to the software as well as the ability to open work saved in proprietary file formats.[27]
shakes head
Man.
And for that matter, I’d think that a lot of countries might have concerns about dependence on a cloud service. I mean, I would if we were talking about China. I’m not even talking about data security or anything – what happens if Country A sanctions Country B and all of Country B’s users have their data abruptly inaccessible?
I get that Internet connectivity is more-widespread now. But, while I’m handicapped without an Internet connection, because I don’t have access to useful online resources, I can still basically do all of the tasks I want to do locally. Having my software unavailable because the backend is unreachable seems really problematic.
Current students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it’s been apps ever since.
Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.
First people didn’t really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90’s when I was in school, we had a few school years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just “know” computers (“digital native” and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don’t know how to use computers.
Even university students studying computer science don’t have this basic knowledge anymore.
Damn, I never even thought of the implications for compsci. That’s gotta be an interesting challenge for profs these days.
It’s a sample of 1, but we hired a young guy with a CS Master’s degree. I told him in polite ways that he should not use ChatGPT and his code sucked. When he was told to fix something, he rewrote it completely with a new prompt instead of understanding bugs. He didn’t last more than 2 months.
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.
Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?
Godamn this made my job feel secure
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.
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.
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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.
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 think most of the tools have a way to download content, the issue is no one does or has a system for their backups. Which is the risk with the cloud, you’re putting all your eggs in someone elses basket.
I would guess that at least part of the issue there is also that the data isn’t all that useful unless it’s also exported to some format that other software can read. That format may not capture everything that the native format stores.
In another comment in this thread, I was reading the WP article on Adobe Creative Cloud, which commented on the fact that the format is proprietary. I can set up some “data storage service”, and maybe Adobe lets users export their Creative Cloud data there. Maybe users even have local storage.
But…then, what do you do with the data? Suppose I just get a copy of the native format. If nothing other than the software on Adobe’s servers can use it, that doesn’t help me at all. Maybe you can export the data, export to an open format like a PNG or something, but you probably don’t retain everything. Like, I can maybe get my final image out, but I don’t get all the project workflow stuff associated with the work I’ve done. Macros, brushes, stuff broken up into layers, undo history…
I mean, you have to have the ability to use the software to maintain full use of the data, and Adobe’s not going to give you that.
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
Slowly and gradually over time they evolved to the abstractions of directories listing files and other directories. I think in early Unix even a directory was a usual file, just differently interpreted.
Now, instead of teaching clueless people they’ve made a whole culture of computing for clueless people only, unfit for proper usage.
One might see how representation of something like a lent of objects is the flat layout again. At some point it doesn’t matter that there’s a normal filesystem under it, or something.
One might also see how using tags to somewhat organize objects into another lent is similar to a two-level layout, where a directory can only list files.
If one is going to consume content, okay, fine.
How would one know if they want to use computers seriously if they haven’t been taught, don’t know where to start teaching themselves, probably have, mild or not, executive dysfunction (a lot of conditions) and, if put in the right situation, would be very capable and interested, but in the wrong situation just can’t learn a single thing?
That was me, I could only reduce distractions and non-transparency after moving to Linux (and then OpenBSD, and then FreeBSD) with obscure WMs and setups. I’m born in 1996, so I had it easier.
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.
I meant - before Unix.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
The original Macintosh filesystem was flat, and according to WP, used for about two years around the mid-1980s. I don’t think I’ve ever used it, personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System
MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.
They switched to a new, hierarchical filesystem, HFS, pretty soon.
I thought that Apple ProDOS’s file system – late 1970s to early 1980s – was also flat, from memory. It looks like it was at one point, though they added hierarchical support to it later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS
ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk’s storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128 KB or more of memory.
Looks like FAT, used by MS-DOS, early 1980s, also started out flat-file, then added hierarchical support:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) was introduced with PC DOS 2.0 as well, and this version also added read-only, archive, volume label, and directory attribute bits for hierarchical sub-directories.[24]
Seems to confirm the tendency, except I was thinking about higher-end and more professional systems.
Ms 365 just assumes that your company has a Ms azure cloud solution, exchange server or just defaults to onedrive. You have to wrestle the software into giving you a local storage folder browser when picking the place to save a new document to. It’s frustrating.
@dustyData Oh my gosh. I see this every single day at work. So many people have no idea where any of their documents are saved, until they can’t find them. I’ll be honest, I use a lot of streaming services for music as well, but I think I might actually go back to simply buying music. Who knows. Call me old-fashioned and only 35 years old, but I still see a point in local storage in traditional desktop type software. There’s not enough of it around here.
I got back into using soulseek and have mp3s on my phone and on my pc. I find it rewarding for privacy and offline reliability purposes. Not to mention it’s free.
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.
All my podcasts appear to use the AAC spoken audio profile? It’s much smaller and cleaner than MPEG layer 3 audio.
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.
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.
Always remember that in some places executive just means the dumbest person in the room and most developers won’t lift a finger if it means they get to see the owners embarrassing themselves in public.
So, if it wasn’t them being blundering idiots, and it wasn’t them deliberately doing this…what the fuck DID happen?
An error in the simulation, probably.
Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.
the randomizer in my car sucks so it’s the same 100 of those 11,000 songs. :-/
I read the manual for my cars radio. It has a max file size limit of like 256 songs or so per folder. But it can also accept 256 folders.
So if your cars is anything like mine you can probably play your songs just by splitting them up into more folders.
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.
The randomizing n my Focus ST is good, but when I tell it to shuffle play it always starts with 1 of 2 different songs, every time.
Yeah WTF is up with that? My car does the same thing with a USB drive full of songs. It will literally play the same “shuffled” sequence over and over every time you drive. I have to take out the drive and change the files on it sometimes to make it actually Shuffle the songs’ order and that’s too much BS
So not a much different experience than Spotify
At least the shuffle is partly coherent.
Found the fellow Volvo user? :)
2013 Ford, but I know they shared some technology for a while.
Afaik Ford Focus == Volvo V40/V50 in those years, basically with a different chassis and insignia :)
And Mazda 3. The platforms are the same but engines and interiors a lot different between the Fords and the Mazdas at least.
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.
I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.
I use Opus when I rip something. It’s been a long time since the last case. I’ve left FreeBSD for Linux and returned back to Linux again since then.
I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.
Unreal Tournament also used Vorbis starting from either 2003 or 2004.
Yep with the music compressed to hell, still sad about it after all this years
But think about the 5 MB they saved!
I just use ogg vorbis and vp9 in webm container, also webp for images. No proprietary nonsense in this house. AV1 sucks on my hardware, but yes eventually.
I use it to (re)compress audiobooks, podcasts and such, they still sound very good at 32 kbps.
Fun fact, Opus has been supported by a hobby OS like MorphOS for years, my ancient hardware doesn’t break a sweat playing it.
Mp3 has been dead to me for nearly a decade. Flac is superior in every way.
@daggermoon Ogg is actually my preference, but so much stuff still doesn’t support it these days.
Except file size. 😁 I convert everything from flac to mp3 before I put it on my phone. I’m lucky in that I can’t tell the difference in quality at all.
It’s just one of those things where once you hear the difference you can’t go back. It’s sort of the difference between a 360p vs 1440p youtube video. The compression artifacts make the music sound so artifical to me. I don’t really know how to describe it. But yes, there is a considerable increase in file size. For me it’s a non issue because I have my music collection on an 8tb hdd. Though I wish phones still had micro sd slots so I could take them with me. My music collection is at 1.2 tb I think. I’m not trying to be an elitist asshole here. I’m just sharing my experience.
I’m curious if you’ve tried listening to lossy compressed audio through a vacuum tube output stage? I use a cheap tube compressor with the attack and release turned to minimal and just a little bit of extra makeup gain so that the tube colors the audio a small amount. Think of it like sanding the layer lines of a 3d print, but for audio. It does introduce a small amount of hiss and colors the midrange a bit more prominently, but you can eq that out.
I’ve never had access to any tube equipment. I did listen to lossy audio from a late '80s Technics reciever which had a similar effect to what you describe. It made the music much more berable to listen to. I do most of my music consumption on my PC now. I do love the mixes used for vinyl records however, It makes me sad they’re not available digitally. Most modern music is brickwalled sadly. I’ll buy a few records now and again because of the dynamic sound. Sorry for the rant but I love dynamic recordings and I’m sad they’re a rarity now outside of expensive vinyl records.
Edit: I just noticed your username. I love it.
If you can, I highly recommend you try it out. There’s relatively inexpensive tube amps, even on Amazon that you could play with and box back up if it’s not your cup of tea. I just looked at the compressor I use and the price has gone up to a point where it doesn’t make much sense anymore, but it is SUPER useful to add some warmth in between a digital source and the class d amps I use in my PA system.
It might be worth trying. I’ve heard people replace the factory tubes with better ones. Is that something worth considering? What tube amp would you reccomend?
I would say its more like 60hz refresh vs 90. The difference isn’t super huge but when you notice it, you can’t un-notice it, so it’s almost better to stay ignorant to it. You still get the same core information, but god damn if 90hz/FLAC isn’t smoother
Mp3’s just don’t sound good to me. It’s a very old format that was pretty much the first of it’s kind. Audio compression (while I don’t like it) has improved greatly over the years. I saw another user bring up OGG OPUS and it’s really impressive what it can do. I was able to compress a song to fit on a floppy disk while still being listenable. It kind of sucks that formats like mp3 and jpg are the standard when open formats that are major improvements over older formats fail to recieve significant adoption. AAC 320 is the 60/90 difference to me. I was shocked how close a 320 kbps m4a file is to CD quality flac.
I personally enjoy PNG image format for my compressed web images, but I’ll be damned if JPG isn’t “good enough” while also being magnitudes smaller, especially when I have to start embedding things as base64 encoded text in outlook and teams at work, or when I don’t want my screenshots folder at home taking 2TB of disk space (Spectacle can change image format).
PNG is really designed for images that are either flat color or use an ordered dither. I mean, we do use it for photographs because it’s everywhere and lossless, but it was never really intended to compress photographs well.
There are formats that do aim for that, like lossless JPEG and one of the WebP variants.
TIFF also has some utility in that it’s got some sort of hierarchical variant that’s useful for efficiently dealing with extremely-large images, where software that deals with most other formats really falls over.
But none of those are as universally-available.
Also, I suppose that if you have a PNG image, you know that – well, absent something like color reduction – it was losslessly-compressed, whereas all of the above have lossless and lossy variants.
JPG is absolutly fine for web based images. I was thinking more of jpeg-xl. Smaller files size and identical quality to jpeg. Also it supports lossless too. WebP is also good but I don’t like that it’s developed by Google.
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Most people are archiving in FLAC but the reality is that almost nobody can hear the difference between 320 (or even V0) and FLAC. So in cases where the disk space makes a difference mp3 still makes sense.
You can easily hear the difference if you have good headphones or speakers
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.
Well, most of my music collection lies as mp3. I care about metadata and all of them have tags. I would love to convert my collection to opus but first I need FLACs and an easy way to move over metadata, since vorbis is different than ID3tag. Do you know a streamlined way for this?
For FLAC you have torrents, no legal way to have that. For tags I use https://beets.io/ but it’s not moving tags, it’s detection and looking up on a database on the internet.
For Flac you have digital market places and CDs you can obtain from store fronts and private sellers like flea markets or shops like ebay or discogs.
Or torrents and DDL.
I actually used discogs a lot in the past. They can be quite expensive at times. Though this will be a mix of everything since not everything can be obtainable legally, at least for my archive.
If I juat want one song and flac isnt expensive to buy digitally I’ll buy it.
But if they want somethibg like 3€ per song I’d bail and pirate it.
Discogs is only if I really want it the CD and it’s out of sale. Else it’s usually less expensive to buy it from the official store.But if I had to choose between discogs and ebay, I’d prefer discogs due to more information about the release and condition.
I still prefer mp3 because it’s small and doesn’t sound any different to me than uncompressed formats, so why waste the disk space? 🤷🏻♂️
I thought so too, but once I got IEMs. The drums felt more organic and I heard parts of guitars that I didn’t on mp3.
Opus is better in every way
I use a combination of mp3s and opus primarily but I can’t remember if opus is the open format ogg or not.
I don’t know all the details but Ogg is dead, and Opus has all the advantages from low quality (Speex) to high quality (better than Ogg). It’s made by the same guys anyway. And starting at 128 kbps approximatively, it’s “near perfect” quality which means your ears won’t detect the difference with FLAC. So Opus should be as small as MP3, as good as FLAC. I love that stuff.
I personally can’t hear any difference with 96kbps Opus.
And what’s the extension of opus? .opus?
Yes.
Opus is better in every way
Except ubiquitousness.
I can play an MP3 on any digital audio device made in the last 20 years.
Ubiquitousness is not an aspect of the codec, let alone a technical one. It’s yet another failure of capitalism.
True. All my devices support it, but many older ones may not.
I thought it didn’t sound any different to me too. That is until me and a friend were riding around listening to Icky Thump by The White Stripes for a few weeks when it first came out.
Higher bitrate, ripped directly from the CD, pretty decent car radio.
We had been listening to my copy, he didn’t own it yet.
We stopped at a record store one day when we were out and he picked up his copy. He wanted to play the CD for whatever reason, and when he stuck the disc in, “berderwiddledod dahta dah BOOM BOOM BOOM”.
I couldn’t believe it. It was like the record just sucked the power out of us both and used it to burst through the speakers.
The mp3, by comparison, sounded shrunk down from the source and splashed with water.
It didn’t change my listening habits because of convenience, but damn. It was an eye opener.
Could it be the sound system? Most people seem to prefer the convenience of Bluetooth, ubiquitous small speakers, and maybe that’s usually the limiting factor.
I stopped trying to keep up with a good sound system when my little ones decided to stuff matchbox cars into the port on my subwoofer. However I do a little set up from Bluetooth with AirTunes/Sonos, so I don’t know if the difference would be apparent. My car is by far my best sound system
Is it definitely the MP3 format at fault here? Was your MP3 from an official source or could it have been from a faulty source or improperly transcoded?
Definitely not.
It was ripped directly from my cd at 320kbps and played on an iPod 5th generation (iPod video).
IIRC that era of iPods had issues with their preamps. I remember when I switched from a Nano to a classic that there was noticeable clipping and other distortion where there wasn’t before. I would have returned it but I had already sold my Nano…
