Technology

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.

Considering most music files are MP3, yes it's still cared about. It's easy and small.

You don't need lossless all the time.

It's useful because it's ubiquitous. Everything that can take in music files supports it.

Is MP3-encoded audio of the best possible quality? No, of course not. But for most people it's Good Enough, especially if you do most of your listening in a noisy environment. MP3s are to lossless formats what CD was to vinyl for so many years.

I remember reading articles at the time of the last patents running out. Some were so misguided it was hilarious.

They called it the death of MP3! As if patents were good or necessary, instead of restrictive and troublesome for interoperability.

I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there's no reason not to support the format.

MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I've been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven't ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)

It's still my preferred format. Everything can play it. At 256kbit or better it sounds fine for usual listening.

I 100% do. I think mp3 is a good compromise of sound and space. It's also the format I'm used to. Just like how people swear by physical record. If I'm at a get together and hear mp3 quality, I'm at home.

That being said, I have my absolute favorites in flac for my iPod 5th gen video I rebuilt. The 5th gen's dac, Wolfson, is a solid little dac for the day and age. Got Rockbox loaded up and I'm ace, but I've hard saved all the Apple firmware for every model in case the time came to sell them. Old iPods could be an investment someday and I own every gen in multiples.

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.

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.

Still care about MP3- it's the bog standard, the thing EVERYthing supports. Like the shitty SBC codec on Bluetooth. I've still got tons of MP3s and they aren't going away anytime soon.

Everything I get new though is high-res FLAC.

Funnily enough the guy who invented MP3 earned enough from royalties to barely afford a regular house in Germany. Meanwhile Apple made billions and rose like a phoenix from the ashes thanks to Apple Music and the iPod that rely on this format.

Sounds fine at good bitrates, universally supported, small, efficient, everywhere.

Yeah, MP3 is just fine. Found zero reason to use any other format. And of course, while the rest of the world streams everything I'll be happily using my massive MP3 library I can fit on a tiny little storage device and take everywhere I go without the need for the interbutts and big brother keeping tabs of what I listen to.

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? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Apart from my home hifi (which is built around flac) everything i liaten to ia mp3. Podcasts - mp3. Car audio system? Max 192kbps mp3. My phone? Full of mp3. And I'm sure I'm not alone. To say mp3 is not relevant anymore is just misguided.

… I’m out of the loop. Why don’t people care about mp3s?

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.

Ogg at lower bitrates sounded better than mp3 at the same rate. Consumers dont care, but for a lot of game developers the zero patent risk and higher quality shipping with smaller files made Ogg a great choice at the time.

For me? FLACs are the only way.... which reminds me, I wonder I can still convert all the SHN (shorten) lossless files I still have. I should get on that before a converter doesn't exist.

Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.

Opus is better than MP3 in every way. File size is either better or the same, and audio is better even at lower bitrates. But realistically, most streaming services don't provide HD audio, so it really doesn't even matter.

249 webm  audio only      2 │    1.58MiB  49k https │ audio only         opus        49k 48k low, webm_dash
250 webm  audio only      2 │    2.09MiB  65k https │ audio only         opus        65k 48k low, webm_dash
251 webm  audio only      2 │    4.14MiB 128k https │ audio only         opus       128k 48k medium, webm_dash
233 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
234 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
140 m4a   audio only      2 │    4.20MiB 130k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.2  130k 44k medium, m4a_dash

This is YouTube music, which generally serves the split audio from a YouTube video as a song. Most of them I checked either don't have audio above 130Kbps or don't even provide MP3/Opus anyways.

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.

I listen to mp3 all the time. Back in the Napster days I collected a ton of music, but moreover I'm a fan of Old Time Radio from the 30s and 40s, so I accumulated around 10,000 of those shows. More than I'll ever have time to listen to. Audiophiles may deride the quality level, but I don't believe in letting perfection be the enemy of good. And even if "computers" - whatever that even means anymore lol - drop support for mp3, there will always be software that plays it as long as there are people with big collections of files they don't want to take the trouble to convert to something else.

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.

Yeah it works. What's the deal? You've got mp3s and then you got flac if you're audiophile.