There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something “good enough” that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.
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 used to think this but the convenience won out. Now over holiday break, my teen discovered my crate of CDs that he doesn’t remember seeing in his lifetime!
And now I need to decide whether to buy a CD or DVD player to transfer to a more usable format - the last one I had was an old Xbox that is no longer with us
Find somewhere that accepts/generates ewaste and you might be able to score an internal CD/DVD drives. We were doing some reorganizing at work and I saw a literal box full of 5.25" drives
You can buy an external drive that plays both CD and DVD
I don’t use any one format. No idea what audio formats I have but probably a lot. Never cared, VLC takes them all.
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_dashThis 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.
It’s less supported, and for me mp3 is largely enough. Can fit a lot of them on my 20€ 128GB usb key…
Youtube Music doesn’t just serve the audio from a video. They do serve the audio from a video if nothing else is available, but they also get releases directly from the publishers/distributors.
The difference in sound quality is definetly noticeable.
Youtube Music doesn’t just serve the audio from a video.
Yes it does. You don’t even need to take my word for it. Look up any song by any artist and find their official video for that song. Take this one as an example: https://youtu.be/kPa7bsKwL-c
Analyze it with yt-dlp or something similar;
249 webm audio only 2 │ 1.51MiB 50k https │ audio only opus 50k 48k low, webm_dash 250 webm audio only 2 │ 2.00MiB 67k https │ audio only opus 67k 48k low, webm_dash 251 webm audio only 2 │ 3.92MiB 130k https │ audio only opus 130k 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 │ 3.90MiB 129k https │ audio only mp4a.40.2 129k 44k medium, m4a_dashYouTube already has access to the audio for that song without any additional effort because of how YouTube works. I’m sure publishers can provide higher quality audio, up to 256Kbps but that option isn’t even enabled for users by default. By default you’re listening to “normal” audio or 130Kbps: https://i.xno.dev/Ow2eC.png
The reason why YouTube Music works is because they already have access to a huge library of music through music videos and the like. They save a ton of time and money by doing things this way and it makes perfect sense that they do…
As I said, some of the music is just the audio of a video, but they also get a lot of releases directly from the publishers. They are both on YT Music and the difference in quality in between them is noticeable.
I have my audio quality set to high in that options menu btw.
I haven’t looked into this so deeply in a while. Thanks for the post! I use VLC, precisely because it plays most anything I throw at it. Cell coverage is spotty, so it’s common to play from files rather than stream. We have a bike ride, doubtless like many cities, social ride meets on the regular. Since Bluetooth, and everyone has a speaker. When I’m riding solo it lets people know I’m coming. Safer that way. I’ve heard people complain they don’t care to hear that cyclists taste in music, which tells me you heard them and weren’t harmed. You’ll hear that music, for a moment, and safely continue on your way. On the group ride everyone plays their own music, call it The Cacophony, if you will. Sometimes the music to the left, to the right match up in interesting ways.
You’ve never heard about bicycle bells, have you?
Perhaps you have heard of people stepping out from behind a bush, unaware that there was an approaching cyclist because that cyclist didn’t realize that there was a need to ring the bell? Have you ever noticed when you phrase a question with a negative assumption it tends to affect how the person responds to that question? Communication takes practice, and with practice can improve over time. I believe in you, and think you have the ability to improve.
Well it would hardly be the cyclist fault if pedestrians and others don’t pay attention to their surroundings?
I don’t see that as a legitimate reason to be a noise complaint.
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.
That sounds fascinating. If I were interested in those shows, where would I start? Are there at least some that are easily listenable to on the open internet?
Check out the many OTR Gold podcasts that have the serialized shows as episodes.
I freaking love old time radio, that stuff is great!
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.
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
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
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 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 !
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
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.
Considering most music files are MP3, yes it’s still cared about. It’s easy and small.
You didn’t need lossless all the time.
Most music files may be MP3s, but music files are rare these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people under 30 have never interacted with a music file at all, they just use streaming services.
I am under 30, and I have interacted with music files.
edit: I don’t know about where you live, but I am definitely not the exception.
There are better lossy formats, like opus.
But MP3 still has its place as it’s supported everywhere.
I would argue that most people never need lossless, because most people don’t use speakers/headphones with high enough fidelity to produce any acoustic difference to a high-bitrate MP3 in the first place.
I used to work with a guy who swore by his FLAC collection, and would listen to it through some $40 Skullcandy earphones. I never understood why.
If you are using the files played back at different tempos or keyshifted, the difference between lossy and lossless is a lot more apparent. For standard playback at normal pitch, mp3 is just fine.
The main benefit to lossless is for archival purposes. I can transcode to any format (such as on mobile) without generational quality loss.
And it means if a better lossy format comes out in the future, I can use that without issue.
A teacher in my highschool (~16 years ago) “demonstrated” that lossless and mp3 are indistinguishable by playing the same song in different formats… On 10€ pc speakers
That sounds like conclusive proof that sound quality is determined by the shittiest component in the signal chain.
Well they have the skulls on them. They must be good! People wouldn’t have died for them otherwise! Duh!!!
Are you a baddie?
A family member is an audio engineer (now also a producer) who owns a good recording studio, and we’ve A/B tested lossy vs lossless on good equipment. He hears things that I don’t, my ear is somewhat untrained. But at mp3 bitrates below 320, I can hear compression artifacts, especially in percussion instruments and acoustic guitar. But if you’re listening in your car or while wearing Bluetooth earbuds while you’re out walking, you probably won’t notice unless the mp3 bitrate is really dismal.
Are you sure? From everything I’ve heard MP3 bitrates at 192 or above are generally considered to be transparent.
In case you want to do it more scientifically, try ABX testing. It’s a bit time consuming but it should provide clearer results.
No, they’re not sure. You’re correct.
Not OP, but I promise you that I can hear what sounds like digital water being thrown over the cymbals when listening to mp3 files below 320 kbps. Even then, every now and then I hear that sound here and there across whatever record I’m listening to.
I don’t experience it when listening to records, CDs, or cassettes.
My hearing used to be very sensitive. When the whole world was using CRTs, I could tell you who had their tv on just standing outside their house.
Exactly, sometimes you just wanna jam to some mp3’s out of an iPod like the good ol days. It’s about the ✨vibes✨
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.
I care, because I’ve been using streaming media for quite a few years years and not kept up with any changes
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
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 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 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 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.
Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.
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.
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.
So not a much different experience than Spotify
At least the shuffle is partly coherent.
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
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.
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.
