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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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? 🤷🏻♂️
Opus is better in every way
Opus is better in every way
Except ubiquitousness.
I can play an MP3 on any digital audio device made in the last 20 years.
True. All my devices support it, but many older ones may not.
Ubiquitousness is not an aspect of the codec, let alone a technical one. It's yet another failure of capitalism.
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.
And what's the extension of opus? .opus?
Yes.
I personally can't hear any difference with 96kbps Opus.
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.
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...
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
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.
