Opus is far better, but with MP3’s there’s been plenty of hardware players only working with that format. Also Opus is new, before it was Vorbis which was kinda as good as MP3 but far less popular.
And yes, MP3 is very “good enough”, like JPEG.
It’s really interesting when you think about that.
In the video world, we’ve had an arms race all throughout the last 25 years for the lowest possible file size at the best possible quality, with new codecs and containers constantly coming in and out of favour. Hardware playback has always been spotty at best, with little guarantee you’ll get a file to play on any device in particular.
Meanwhile I could rip a CD and put it on even my first-generation MP3 player from the year 1999, and it would work. A blessing we rather take for granted.
I guess there just hasn’t been sufficient pressure to toss MP3 out completely. From an evolutionary perspective, just like the horseshoe crab, it is “good enough” and so it endures.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
You just reminded me: A while back there was this slew of articles coming out of the tech press saying MP3 was now dead.
And why did they say that? Because the last Fraunhofer Patent on an MP3 related invention ran out.
Instead of reporting the format was now fully free, those idiots thought that meant it was now dead 😂