Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 day agoA lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.
MP3 has some disadvantages over more modern formats, regardless the used bitrate. It’s been a long while since I was very interested in audio formats, so I may not be up to date on some newer developments but unless anything major changed, MP3 can’t do truly gapless playback between tracks (used in live albums), for example.
nixcamic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Aren’t there unofficial extensions to mp3 for gappless playback? IIRC you can tag tracks as gappless and many audio players will make them so.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes and no.
IIRC an MP3 track is divided in fixed-length frames and unless the actual audio matches perfectly with the end of a frame, it’s not possible and that’s why cross-fading plugins for audio players were invented. The padding data is there either way but can be documented in the metadata section of a file.
Last I checked (and that was years ago, so I may be wrong) this approach was never perfect and prone to breaking. It’s an inherent flaw with the format where some form of workaround exists.
That said, for most use cases this is irrelevant.
r_deckard@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Audio playback is such a low-demand process, surely a player (e.g.VLC) can spare a thread to line up playback of track 2, a few seconds before track 1 ends? It knows the exact length of the track, why can’t track 2 be initiated when the audio level in track 1 drops to zero (or minus infinity dB) in the last frame?
woelkchen@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Workarounds in a specific player don’t negate the fact that the format has limitations.