The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the late 90s, as an audio compression format there is an argument to be made that it has long since been superseded by better formats and other changes. [Ibrahim Diallo] makes that very argument in a recent blog post. In a world with super fast Internet speeds and the abstracting away of music formats behind streaming services, few people still care about MP3.
The last patents for the MP3 format expired in 2012 in the EU and 2017 in the US, ending many years of incessant legal sniping. For those of us learning of the wonders of MP3 back around ’98 through services like Napster or Limewire, MP3s meant downloading music on 56k dialup in a matter of minutes to hours rather than days to weeks with WAV, and with generally better quality than Microsoft’s WMA format at lower bitrates. When portable media players came onto the scene, they were called ‘MP3 players’, a name that stuck around.
But is MP3 really obsolete and best forgotten in the dustbin of history at this point? Would anyone care if computers dropped support for MP3 tomorrow?
Alternatives
It’s hard to disagree with [Ibrahim]’s point that MP3 isn’t quite as important anymore. Still, his argument of AAC being a good alternative to MP3 misses that the AAC format is also patent-encumbered. Specifically, there’s a patent license for all manufacturers and developers of “end-user codecs,” which involves per-unit pricing. Effectively, every device (computer, headphones, smartphone, etc.) incurs a fee. That’s why projects like FFmpeg implement AAC and other encumbered formats while leaving the legal responsibilities to the end-user who actually uses the code.
While FLAC and Vorbis (‘ogg’) are truly open formats, they’re not as widely supported by devices. Much like VGA, MP3 isn’t so much sticking around because it’s a superior technological solution but because it Just Works® anywhere, unlike fancier formats. From dollar store MP3 players to budget ‘boomboxes’ to high-end audio gear, they’ll all playback MP3s just fine. Other formats are likely to be a gamble, at best.
This compatibility alone means that MP3 is hard to dislodge, with formats like Ogg Vorbis trying to do so for decades and still being relatively unknown and poorly supported, especially when considering hardware implementations.
Audio Quality
Since the average person is not an audiophile who is concerned with exact audio reproduction and can hear every audio compression artefact, MP3 is still perfectly fine in an era where the (MP2-era) Bluetooth SBC codec is what most people seem to be content with. In that sense, listening to 320 kbps VBR MP3 files with wired headphones is a superior experience over listening to FLAC files with the Bluetooth SBC codec in between.
This leads to another point made by [Ibrahim]. 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. Yet, at the same time, there’s a resurgence in interest in physical media and owning a physical copy of content, which means dealing with files.
We see this also with MP3 players. Even though companies like Apple abandoned their iPod range and Sony’s current Walkmans are mostly rebranded Android smartphones with the ‘phone’ part stripped out, plenty of portable media players are available brand-new. People want portable access to their media in any format.
Amidst this market shift back to a more basic, less online focus, the MP3 format may not be as visible as it was even a decade ago, but it is by no means dead.
These days, rolling your own MP3 player is almost trivial. We’ve seen some fairly small ones.
Well… All my music library is mp3-320 and I dont need to change it…
same, i started also using flac when i could get flac. and there was a time id just transcode it to mp3, but i dont really need to and it shows up and sorts in winamp ok. i still use winamp. my collection is also a very small footprint in my storage stack, so its not hard to back up and maintain. people see streaming as a better option, but i dont see it that way. i dont need to search, or hand out personal information, or create an account, or be connected to the internet, or be bombed with popular bands that suck.
Switch to VBR, same quality but smaller size.
Storage is also cheaper than ever. It’s not worth the hassle and potential loss of compatibility with old devices.
My biggest problem with MP3 is that it doesn’t allow a gapless transition from one track to another. I’ve seen a few tracks with VERY small gaps – mostly inaudible, but definitely present when looked at in Audacity. And I’ve never been able to encode my own files in MP3 in such a manner that the gap between tracks wasn’t plainly audible. This is a real problem when listening to Classical music, live albums, or any recording where one track is supposed to segue seamlessly into the next.
Any CDs I get are encoded in FLAC, which of course supports gapless playback. When I have to deal with lossy music files, I use Audacity to render them truly gapless where necessary; then I export them as Opus files, which are also capable of gapless playback. (Based on what I’ve read, Opus is also audibly better than MP3 at lower bit rates).
I have well north of 2TB of music. Yes, I could have smaller drives and faster backups if I encoded all the high-res files as lossy 320K – but storage is cheap, and the data discarded in lossy encoding can never be recovered. I’m just more comfortable with having all my music in lossless form wherever possible.
You most of it is inaudible… How is it a very “real” problem and not a “mostly” invented one?
Actually there have been several double blind studies where it’s been proven that people have more of an emotional/physiological response to uncompressed music vs. music that has been digitally compressed. This holds true across genres, as well regardless of age, sex, etc of the listener.
That’s probably why vinyl records will never disappear.
I’m a big vinyl lover, but vinyl records just aren’t it for uncompressed sound in my opinion. They have been mastered from digital files since the late 80’s, so you’re better off being closer to the source with a digital file. Vinyl has a lot of inherent limitations that make it fun to listen to, but not a reference medium for music.
Even if the studies which you haven’t referenced were flawless, that’s a misleading statement that pretends like all compression is the same. What about lossless algorithms? Does the file lose its emotional impact if you zip it?
I guess I’m confused. Gapless playback should have nothing to do with the underlying file format. There’s absolutely nothing to prevent MP3 player software from loading the first 5 seconds of the next track, decompressing it into memory, and start it playing at the exact millisecond the previous track ends, surely?
A part of the problem is that the number of audio samples in an MP3 file can not be an arbitrary number, It’s always some multiple of (I guess) the chunks on which the MP3 algorithm does its thing. You can add “silence” to the end of a track, and the player can attempt to analyze that silence and remove it again, but because MP3 is lossy, the “silence” will not be “silence” anymore.
And from there on you have to put in trickery to attempt to play MP3 files in a “gapless” way.
And there are other problems too. From what I remember, CD’s have a 2 second gap / pause between songs, and in continuous albums this may be (is?) solved in different ways. Combine that with lots of different audio extraction software and sloppy or ignorant people and you have another source for errors here.
CDs are one continuous audio file for the whole album, there are no gaps or separate tracks for songs. The table of contents your CD player reads when it first loads a new CD tells it where the tracks are.
There’s no technical reason why an MP3 player cannot keep grabbing more audio frames from a different file to continue playing seamlessly. The question is simply whether those subsequent audio frames contain seamless audio.
The audio frame in a normal MP3 file is about 26 ms long. It can be shorter. Given some arbitrary pieces of audio that are recorded into two MP3 files that are supposed to play seamlessly back to back, the worst case you’ll get is one frame worth of the original audio missing or repeating because the two files didn’t align perfectly with respect to the original audio. This creates a barely perceptible skip or a pop in the audio – not a gap. 26 ms it too short for humans to recognize as a pause, and it wouldn’t be silence anyhow unless you deliberately insert an empty frame in the stream.
The ONLY reason there would have been a gap between two tracks is because the player software didn’t buffer the next file before the previous one ended, or the recording itself contains silence.
In practice, if you were recording continuous audio into multiple MP3 files, you would encode the entire audio stream into one continuous MP3 stream, then simply pick the audio frames into separate files. These could then be played back seamlessly without skips or pops because one file stops exactly and perfectly where the next file starts.
A regular audio CD is a continuous stream of audio from the beginning to the end. When the player plays it, it’s simply following the tracking spiral with no regard to where a song starts or ends. When they record it, they deliberately leave 2 seconds of silence between songs to make the gaps. If it’s a continuous album, they don’t.
FYI: The 2 second gap in CD’s was intentional and completely optional. True gapless playback could be done.
The audio bitstream on a CD-DA also encodes the timestamp and if such a gap was desired between songs, there was 2 seconds of silence encoded with a negative timestamp, from -2 seconds to 0.
The “start” and “end” markers of a song were still pointing to the real start and end of the song, so the 2-second gap was not directly addressable and would only be played during contineous play.
Each audio frame on a CD contains interleaved subchannels (labeled P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W) that encode additional data used for timing and control purposes, copyright flags, CD text, etc. The simplest way to signal the start of a new track is to encode a “here is a new track” flag in the P subchannel. The flag consists of 150 sectors of all 1’s, which corresponds to 2 seconds of audio. If you’re just playing the disc from the beginning to the end, the player will ignore the flags and keep on playing through the gaps between the tracks, so you can have audio there instead of silence.
The P or “pause” channel flag was meant for players that had minimal control circuitry and no CPU – just enough digital logic to track the groove and pull bits off the disc to the DAC. That meant they didn’t have very precise control over the seeking behavior. That’s why the flag had to be so long, so it could be reliably detected. The audio was muted for 2 seconds so when the player starts playing, wherever it happens to land, it won’t send out the last few notes of the previous track.
More advanced players would use the Q subchannel. It contains the disc’s table of contents and the time codes for the tracks. It encodes the relative time since the beginning of the track, and the absolute time since the beginning of the recorded “session”. There is no such thing as a negative time stamp, but the player can seek backwards from the beginning of a track, which makes the display read negative.
Some CDs were also mastered with hidden tracks.
Each disc or recorded session starts with a lead-in section that contains the table of contents in the Q channel repeating over and over for redundancy. Then comes the P flag, then the first actual audio track starts playing. If you seek backwards from the beginning of the first track, you’ll find the audio data in the lead-in section, which is usually missing – unless you deliberately put something in there.
I may have inadvertently confused the issue by referring to “gapless playback”, because the failure seems to be in the MP3 encoding. I know the gaps are there on EVERY MP3 file I’ve ever looked at in Audacity – and I’ve looked at a LOT. Sometimes the gaps – ‘dead’ spaces at the beginning or the end, I don’t remember which – are short enough to be mostly inaudible. At other times they are very audible. But in my experience they’re always there.
I can start with gapless files in FLAC or WAV. When I convert them to MP3 they are no longer gapless. When I convert them to Ogg or Opus, they ARE gapless. There are other lossy formats which are also gapless – if I recall correctly WMA is among them, and possibly AAC as well. But in my experience MP3 is never truly gapless.
No reason it wouldn’t. That’s just your player/decoder that sucks. Winamp did gapless playback since the 90’s.
As far as I can recall it wasn’t gapless it just crossfaded. I made a few albums and mastering for CD you could make it so two tracks wouldn’t miss a beat when they played together (standard mastering left 2 seconds of silence between tracks but you could remove that to blend them together), but mp3s queued up together on a number of MP3 players never blended seamlessly. I could never work it out so it was player agnostic on release. I’ll have to go back and test FLAC to see if that made a difference.
That’s because it was up to the player. Most just didn’t bother to implement true gapless playback.
You could set it to crossfade on starts and ends of songs, but that would actually disable gapless playback. By default, Winamp only crossfades on seek and pause/stop.
Umm, the distinction between a gap or no gap, is not in the file. It’s in the music player that you’re listening to it on. Set the crossfade between tracks to between 3-5 seconds and the gapless transition happens seamlessly.
This is not correct, the MP3 file format is not gapless. This is because it can’t end on an arbitrary timestamp. If the song doesn’t end exactly on a timestamp compatible with MP3, silence is padded at the end to make it compatible. With other words: Most of the time, the MP3 file format inserts an audio gap at the end.
Often, this is not an issue, however it is noticeable for albums where successive tracks flow into each other without any silence. You can’t duplicate the original audio with MP3 files because it’s a limitation of the file format itself.
That being said, some players claimed to detect this silence at the end and tried to remove it, but I never found an implementation that worked well.
So the gap problem remains as it is structural and the workarounds (hacks?) don’t seem to work well.
MP3 can be gapless if you use a bit reservoir. See the -b option for mp3splt for example.
Yes you can. You simply encode the entire album as one continuous MP3 file, then split it into separate tracks at the frame boundaries. An MP3 file is just a stream of short audio frames one after the other, so you can break it apart and combine it back together as you wish. The problem you mention happens only when you try to encode each track individually and separately.
The only compromise you have to make is that your tracks won’t start or end at precisely the original time codes as recorded on the CD, but I can’t imagine why you would care about that. The maximum error is +/- 26 milliseconds.
Plexamp allows gapless playback for MP3s. The MP3 files just need to be encoded properly when splitting them, for example using the -b flag to mp3splt.
.MP3 doesn’t need the cloud (the whole physical media thing), and it’s good enough for most people, and an excellent point about Bluetooth eating up the quality regardless. Questions of bitrate are even less important nowadays because of the insane access to storage and network speed, and back when a 6 gig hard drive cost a weeks pay, a 128 kbps joint stereo .mp3 still sounded a hell of a lot better than a cassette. Not to mention that back then you couldn’t really encode them in real-time. Hardware caught up in a big way. I don’t think dropping support for MP3 would be very bright. Like the TGA image format, it will probably never die, nor should it.
I encode newish stuff at 256 or 320 kbps but I still have many fine MP3s at 112 & 128 kbps that sound fine.
The only things in my library in MP3 are a handful of oddball albums that literally only every existed in the format.
And those are dwindeling as the artists dig out the sources and embrace Bandcamp or make anniversary remasters.
I did audio engineering, and sensei was rather fond of Vorbis.
Needless to say, I aint part of the basic mobs lol.
Lossless formats on the drives, stays lossless if its in higher sampling / bitdepth. Everything else gets to be in a mix of formats because why not.
Plus, I aint always in signal area. Hard to stream in the middle of the woods.
Remeber, our forefathers moved away from that god aweful MP3 for a reason, amd licensing was not the main one (at least as someone who is trained, that was never brought up)
The abstraction away from file systems is a travesty. Im so grateful to have learned the basics on MSDOS and Win 3.11, some folks will never comprehend the inner workings of their computing devices ( due to corporations trying to scam them out of cash ).
+1
WinPlay3 and MOD4WIN ran on Windows 3.1, btw!
Old versions of WinAmp, too, via Win32s extension.
modern is ok if you dont install all the modules. default install is a bloody mess.
Modscene represent!
thing is there is going to always be a file system, even if the gui doesnt break out all its features for the end user anymore (this is why i find phones completely unusable). on linux everything is a file, and i dont see myself keeping windows around forever (especially as my linux knowledge exceeds my windows knowledge and 11 being a no go for me). i even put rockbox on my ipod so i can just copy files to it without using a 3rd party app.
And then there’s Microsoft WinFS.
I still always have file explore open, with every program stored in it’s own folder instead of the ridiculous windows my stuff and program files, and still open things via goingto where they actually are.
As a teacher, teaching a computer based class, students have no idea how the hell to deal with files and folders :/
It sounds like a case of not understanding directories and subdirectories.
i bloody hate it when operating systems dictate where your files are supposed to be. it discourages people from actually working with the file system. phones take this to an absurd level. what i do on windows is have a second drive or partition that is for data, set up a junction point wherever the os stores a folder in the bowels of appdata of the bits i want to keep. then if the os goes tango uniform, i re-install, run a script and it sets up all my file links. the real files are where i want them, on a partition i can back up in full, and the cruft gets nuked.
gonna have to get used to the linux way of doing this. i think some installers offer to let you specify your own drives/partitions for home folders at install. but im not sure how to losslessly restore them, perhaps even when moving to new distros. given the extra security linux filesystems have.
When releasing our CD as download, we were faced with the question which format to use. In the end we chose 320 kbps MP3 because with FLAC, Opus, Vorbis, AAC there is no guarantee that the person downloading the songs will know how to play them on their device.
¿Porque los dos?
The bandcamp method of letting you pick is better than just giving everyone lossy files.
Exactly what I thought.
Do it like Bandcamp, don’t choose a rubbish version just because there are people who don’t care.
Because the chosen hosting service did not support selection of the file format at download time and if a user downloads a song in two formats, we would have to pay twice to the collecting society (i.e. GEMA).
As an owner of a 10+ year old vehicle which can play either almost any MP3 or very-specifically-formatted WMAs, yes I do care about MP3s. Yeah, I have Bluetooth, but my phone is already busy doing other things. It is also easier to control the onboard MP3 player from the steering wheel than a BT attached one. Not to mention I do not care for streaming subscriptions, preferring the one-and-done style of purchasing music. I also do not have unlimited mobile data on my phone which also makes streaming a non-starter.
I mourned the loss of Google Play Music, but thankfully there are companies like 7digital still selling DRM-free MP3 tracks.
The role of MP3s in aftermarket head units in older vehicles keeps the format alive for a certain demographic. Support in cheap hobbyist electronics modules is another.
Heck yah, my cars mp3 player is a huge reason for me to keep using mp3!
Decades ago, when I was a teenager, I might’ve cared about ＳＵＰＥＲＩＯＲ quality of Wintersun album in FLAC format, but back then I’d never hear a difference on my tiny Creative 2.1 speakers.
As I’m getting older, I’m indifferent to whether it’s MP3 128k, 320k or FLAC. My hearing won’t get any better and all I really care about is melody and vocals, not some 20 kHz wankery.
yea, i still got some 64k mp3s in my collection, but they are black metal and it makes it sound kvlt. i should try to find better quality, but its possible the band uploaded them in that format on purpose.
I rip all my music to 128Kbs, stereo MP3 for listening in my car. It gives the track a sound reminiscent of tape hiss and old cassettes, the way music is supposed to sound in a car.
“Decades ago, when I was a teenager, I might’ve cared about the quality of education, but back then I’d never be able to make a difference while studying and working for minimum wage. As I’m getting older, I’m indifferent to whether they’re teaching new math, basket weaving, or essential skills/career prep. My education won’t get any better and all I really care about is having graduated, not some academic wankery.” :P ;)
Just saying, no need for everything to stop dead as soon as you no longer care about it. That being said, what I’d rather improved instead of 20khz is the low end (sub-20hz). Even old ears can still tell that the bass is fake, they substitute way too much thump for the ability to actually emit a little bit of controlled woof where it’s part of the original sound.
An adjustment for the harman curve like the old stuff used to do with “loudness eq” would also be great, because I’m trying to keep the hearing I’ve got and don’t intend to play things at high volume like they’re mixed for. Same thing with limited dynamic range – nobody releases anything with much of that because we’re no longer using vinyl so there’s no need to do so – and in streaming, it’s even more compressed. Streaming is worse than FM radio in a car, much less a CD or a download. Sometimes even worse than a tape, although maybe with better noise floor.
The default 128 kbit/s bit rate was awful. You could hear a metallic, muffled sound.
192 kbit/s was becoming better, but still inferior to a VOC file sampled at 22 KHz.
That being said, the differences were good noticeable when you were a young person under 25 years wearing real hi-fi headphones.
Like an AKG Monitor K141 or a Sennheiser HD 515.
That’s when your were able to hear what you were missing.
With lousy earphones from the bubble gum machine you didn’t hear any difference, maybe.
That’s what many people had. Those poor earphones (in ear plugs).
Heck, even a pair of lightweight 1970s Sony Walkman stereo headphones were way better than what was bundled with mp3 players!
But in regards to the late 90s/2000 music it didn’t matter perhaps.
Users who played pop music from that era had no taste anyway and not even hi-fi could have saved the music quality. ;)
VOC file sampled at 22 kHz? Even at 128 kbits/s MP3 has higher frequency content than that VOC.
The free encoders were awful.
As a very early licensee, we did a lot of double blind a/b testing against source material using Fraunhofer (paid) encoders, in professional studios. There was some little material that had artifacts. Very few “audiophiles” could tell any difference vs bitrate.
The only thing that was commonly detected was “amplitude stereo” ie mono with amplitude of the two channels varying.
However “free” encoders – all the popular ones, based off the reference C code (i.e. a minimal implementation that can generate a test bitstream), and were frequently atrocious.
If y’all had paid $25USD, you would have had an encoder which was still performing better 15 years later.
Don’t pay. Don’t get.
As far as you know, did any of the free encoders catch up with commercial products ?
I think we can distinguish at least 3 groups of people, those younger ones that really don’t care to pay a music stream service because they don’t know there are alternatives, those who knew the old formats and ways of enjoying music but they prefer paying the service for some reason and the last group is formed for people like us,who don’t bite the “own nothing be happy” stuff ,people (like me) that don’t see anything wrong in keeping tons of mp3 files away from the clouds or playing ABBA chiquitita song in a 33 rpm LP record. And damn I get goosbumps every single time!
im still fond of the infinite storm slip track at the end of reign in blood.
Repent and believe in the gospel…hold on I’m atheist! …but yeah repent and believe :)
the gospel according to slayer.
though im more partial to the gospel according to motorhead.
weird that you wrote a whole article about audio codecs in 2025 and didn’t even mention Opus once. it’s better than AAC and has a royalty-free patent license. it makes every other audio codec except FLAC (for lossless) obsolete.
AAC and MP3 do still have some value, but only for legacy devices.
i mostly keep the old formats around because its hard to find old songs in new formats on torrent sites.
Just download the FLAC and convert to opus (or whatever).
Unless you have to seed the stuff for a longer time…
some of my stuff is rare and hard to find. no point transcoding a lesser format to better one because you will at least waste space and at most destroy audio quality.
i suppose there are supersampling techniques but i generally dont like overly processed music anyway and would probibly notice. always rip from lossless sources.
I read the first half, then got the feeling they are missing opus, searched for opus and then decided it wasn’t worth to read the rest.
Opus is used everywhere. Youtube, most video conferences, … for whatever reason I don’t think it’s used for video streaming services…
Hi, it’s been mentioned somewhere in the Vorbis link..
Personally, I’ve never heard of of Opus before but knew of Ogg Vorbis.
Funny, considering that this newfangled Opus thing is 12 years old already. 😅
Most of my music is either mp3 or aac from when HDD space was still premium. Last year I bought my girls iPods from eBay because 1. They are too young for phones. 2. I’m not gonna pay for yet another streaming service 3. Someone has hidden the rum 4. I’d like them to have the experience of a single purpose device that does that one thing well.
I’ve still got a large collection of MP3s, but I mostly use FLAC and Opus now.
Practically all my music, and I have an unbelievable amount, is in the FLAC format. My ‘Mp3 player’ plays it, my phone plays it, my computer music players play it. Yes they are bigger files but who cares, all my devices have lots of storage space.
Anyone who argues “moar data better!” has never heard of the Von Neumann bottleneck.
If you don’t know the term, it means computers are limited by their ability to move data between storage and the CPU. Even if your CPU is infinitely fast, it can only crunch the data in its registers. If it’s connected to a 1kHz memory bus, your infinite-speed CPU can’t work any faster than a 1kHz CPU.
And bandwidth doesn’t scale according to Moore’s Law. Sending a thousand bits always costs a thousand times as much as sending one bit. A 128-bit bus will always be at least 128 times larger than a 1-bit bus. A 1GHz bus will always use at least 1000 times as much energy per second as a 1MHz bus.
Know what else doesn’t scale with Moore’s Law? The energy density of batteries. To a first approximation, the amount of energy you can get from 1cc of battery is a constant. And that leads to the fundamental tradeoff of all battery powered designs: the more energy you use, the faster your battery runs out.
You know what’s always faster, more energy efficient, cheaper, and easier? Using less data.
And there’s another angle.. the Jevons paradox: making machines more energy efficient increases the total amount of energy consumption. It becomes cost effective to use powered systems for a wider range of things.
Microcontrollers are a thing.. you may have heard of them. 8-bit computing is alive, well, and continually getting smaller and cheaper in a way that does scale with Moore’s Law. The MP3 player that cost $100 twenty years ago is an afternoon’s project with a $1 chip today. That means the range of cost-effective applications for MP3s today is probably two orders of magnitude larger than it was back in the days of Napster and limewire.
Efficient data storage protocols never stop being useful.
Good points, but representations and usages aren’t quite that black and white, just like a lot of other aspects of computing. The # of people that would agree with all of your statements is non-0, especially when it comes to music formats. ‘Moar data’ can better when you want to keep backups/reference, and they can work as-is just fine at times when the cost of listening at that quality level directly isn’t an issue. Someone else was describing just that in other comments here. More streamlined formats can be better when you’re listening portably or don’t care about max qualitt. Some of us mentioned doing that here too. And nothing stops you from having both. You can convert from backup/reference quality as desired beforehand to support either case or anything in between at any time. Storage tech getting better and cheaper makes all of it easier too.
Not so fast there buddy. The switching frequency doesn’t have anything to do with how much energy you’re burning per cycle – that depends on the sending and receiving logic.
In theory there’s a minimum energy associated per bit, but practical digital circuits are nowhere near ideal, and the more modern implementation of a data bus that runs a 1000 times faster may still use a fraction of the energy compared to the ancient 1 MHz version.
A story about something that happened eight years ago? Slow news day?
I have 9k mp3/mp4 tracks in a 256G microSD in my phone. Earliest 128k, though I try to replace those when i can. BTW, YouTube audio in downloaded Video is usually high quality. Also carry 1k ebooks. No network access? Phone data limits? Nbd
Don’t want to pay Spotify? Free of change 24/7 streaming audio curated by humans with rare tracks never on Spotify instead? Try internet radio.
Stations by genre:
http://directory.shoutcast.com/scradioinwinamp
Industrial playlist for multimedia player$ß
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q3jO_tfgLjcHkkplg0s1x3qAqyWsv8hI/view?usp=drivesdk
Now it can come bundled with FFMPEG?
Ibrahim here. I do want to point out, that my entire collection of music since my windows 98 machine has been in mp3 format. I tend to convert all my audiobooks to mp3 for its convenience as well.
My main arguments was for software makers, it was expensive to include the mp3 en/decoder. But now that it is free, the main convenience of mp3 (small size) is no longer a pain point.
As a reference, my computer in 1998 had 2GB of storage (3 CDs?) and a 56k modem (3.5kb/s). We desperately needed mp3. Today, can stream a 4k movie, that’s several times the size of my old hard drive. Kids don’t even know what an mp3 is.
I loved reading the following:
“Since the average person is not an audiophile who is concerned with exact audio reproduction and can hear every audio compression artefact, MP3 is still perfectly fine in an era where the (MP2-era) Bluetooth SBC codec is what most people seem to be content with. In that sense, listening to 320 kbps VBR MP3 files with wired headphones is a superior experience over listening to FLAC files with the Bluetooth SBC codec in between.”
HaD loves sh1tting on audiophiles, but the above just underscores the fact that the vast majority of consumers have selected convenience over fidelity in their choice of audio playback.
This isn’t a terrible thing, and I readily concede that today’s MP3 and streaming formats, and the available playback systems, provide a very acceptable level of music reproduction in most scenarios – personal entertainment in the car, on transit, at the gym, parties etc etc. Of course I have and use such gear.
But when it comes to the highest quality of sound reproduction, or for more immersive listening experiences, CDs and even vinyl are superior sources, and they justify having better quality equipment, especially speakers.
I hope people remember this when once again lining up to kick at people who are seeking out the best possible sound reproduction.
HaD loves shitting on audiophile wankery, not just audiophiles. We all understand that there is better equipment that will give better sound reproduction, but we also know that putting crystals on our speakers doesn’t do anything and de-magnetising CDs is nonsense.
I think I still have those red self adhesive vinyl rings you could apply to the rims of CD to make them balance better or something! Or make them look like DeutscheGramaphon CDs rather than the cheap no name orchestra on Naxos.
I can respect an audiophile who wants the best quality money can buy.
I don’t respect an audiophile who spends any amount of money on wankery.
From what I remember WMA had better quality at the same bit rate.
MP3 is still great for in-app sound effects!
I disagree about the lack of support on devices for FLAC/OGG. Most devices people would use for music anymore are ones that use user controllable software and most music players or apps have wide support since open source libraries for large swaths of formats are readily available.
Theres another active scene that isnt acknowleged here. As an active DJ I know that mp3 is still very much in use by most DJs that you’ve heard of. Some use flacs but most use 320 mp3s. So if you’re listening to music mixed by anyone online or in a club theres a decent chance its mp3.
I use 95% flac myself, but I have way more drive space than most people since I also work with video alot. The simple fact is that no one can really tell the difference other than those dealing with ridiculously high end gear in a pristine setting. And that is a strongly vocal but tiny minority of audio listeners.
Theres another active scene that isnt acknowleged here. As an active DJ I know that mp3 is still very much in use by most DJs that you’ve heard of. Some use flacs but most use 320 mp3s. So if you’re listening to music mixed by anyone online or in a club theres a decent chance its mp3.
I use 95% flac myself, but I have way more drive space than most people since I also work with video alot. The simple fact is that no one can really tell the difference other than those dealing with ridiculously high end gear in a pristine setting. And that is a strongly vocal but tiny minority of audio listeners.
The podcast ecosystem is quite alive and well. And download (i.e., not streamed) episodes are always or nearly so, MP3s.
As a person that still lives with 3Mbps DSL, I appreciate compact file types. I’m fine with the quality of the music I get in MP3 and frequently burn mix CDs for the 6 disc changer in my car.
WHAT YEAR IS IT‽
i am 20 ive used mp3s since i was 13. it is so cool using them in the single din mod in my car
I still have my Diamond Rio PMP 300 and the parallel adapter.
I rip all of my CDs to MP3 for use in the car. I can make a USB stick that holds 1000 songs (or more) and I like the convenience of having all of my music in one spot on my hard disk. I can back it up off site and I don’t have to worry if my CDs or PC are stolen. I still have all of my music.
As for quality, I am 62 with hearing aids. How much quality can these old ears actually hear? lol
Computer programs are not patentable in the EU, but the EPO worked around the exclusion with the ‘as such’ loophole.
After the 2005 software patent directive, big corporations pushed for the Unified Patent Court, where the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) can’t have a say of the matter, the European patent convention (EPC) being international law, not EU Law.
For the codec part, big corporations (Nokia, Airbus, 3M) managed to get their attorneys as part time judges, meaning they will work in the morning for big corporations, and judge in the afternoon. The Nokia judge is a ‘codec’ expert.
As someone that switched from streaming to owning my music outright I’ve chosen FLAC as my codec of choice. Mp3 had its limelight and for it’s time it made sense. Internet was slow and storage was premium. These are non issues these days. I’d say mp3 has only one advantage today and that is wide cross compatibility.
In the age of streaming, I rarely actually buy music anymore. I only will buy an album if it’s a local/independent/underground band I really want to support, or Metallica. The only way I will buy it is if there is an mp3 option for purchase. I mean I will buy the CD if I’m at a concert for independent/underground bands, but if not at a concert I will almost always buy the mp3 download. I thoroughly enjoy buying mp3 albums from SoundCloud to directly support the artists there. Jelly Roll wasn’t on soundcloud before he got famous, so I bought all his older albums via Amazon mp3. Summoner’s Circle is one of the best bands I’ve ever heard and I bought all their albums on soundcloud (in addition to buying a CD at a concert).
I have a ton of mp3 uploaded to my YouTube Music library, most of which aren’t even available for streaming on YT or Spotify.
Owning the mp3 version of albums ensures that I will still have the music I want if I lose internet or a streaming service goes down, etc. In this day and age where you don’t actually “own” most digital purchases like games, movies, and music purchased via streaming service, I find great value in mp3 album purchases and actually owning what I’ve purchased.
Long Live mp3!
make sure you keep the local copy. YouTube Music will replace songs with “better” versions to save space. My friend had several parody songs replaced with the original
That’s funny the only time I refuse to buy an album is when it is Metallica. You know because of that thing they did. Love the music though
I was banned from raspberry forum for asking how/when they’ll release free keys for vc1, because patents looked expired to me. Any thought on this. ?
I’m still looking for a nice mp3 player that might last for a while.
ps I tried leaving the above comment via Firefox and kept getting “nonce verification failed” or something. I also noticed there’s no “I’m not a robot” checkbox thingy anymore?
I like to “own” my music and not be dependent on some streaming service that doesn’t have half of my library available on its service.