Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
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 …
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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.
Because I don't want it to take up too much space? My phone has a ton of storage but I would still rather not spend tons of it at a time...
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.
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, forever.
Ye, when outdoors in my wireless headphones, I won't even hear the difference.
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.
Having to rely on an internet connection for your main connection would be inconvenient as hell.
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.
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
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
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 !
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.
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
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.
Soulseek is a goldmine of high quality FLACs.
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