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.
Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
Submitted 2 days ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/08/freed-at-last-from-patents-does-anyone-still-care-about-mp3/
Comments
CidVicious@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Considering most music files are MP3, yes it’s still cared about.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 1 day ago
There are better lossy formats, like opus.
But MP3 still has its place as it’s supported everywhere.
merc@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
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.
Remavas@programming.dev 16 hours ago
I am under 30, and I have interacted with music files.
BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Exactly, sometimes you just wanna jam to some mp3’s out of an iPod like the good ol days. It’s about the ✨vibes✨
umbraroze@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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.)
realitista@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
It’s still my preferred format. Everything can play it. At 256kbit or better it sounds fine for usual listening.
Disonantezko@lemmy.sdf.org 17 minutes ago
Even at 160kbps, maybe 1/1.000.000 people can recognice a FLAC vs MP3 trying 10 times (continuous) using expensive headphones and players, 320kbps is overkill, I prefer a FLAC and just encode to Opus.
Right now Opus is better and can be played in web browsers, smartphones, YouTube and Netflix are using that for awhile.
Eyedust@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
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.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
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.
bokherif@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.
kogasa@programming.dev 1 day ago
All people. 320kbps mp3 is completely audibly transparent under all normal listening conditions. It’s a low-tier audiophile meme to claim otherwise but they will never pass a double-blind test.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A 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.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I’d argue you’ve got that backwards; CD is to vinyl what lossless is to .mp3. That said, I know what you mean.
hogmomma@lemmy.world 1 day ago
From what I understand, vinyl and CDs can both output in a range greater than human ears can detect, so the medium isn’t as important as the gear being used to listen to the recording.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There’s a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can’t record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won’t work.
It’s functionally impossible to improve on “red book” CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround…Stereo.) It’s why there really hasn’t been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80’s and still is.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 day ago
Vinyl is lossy in that any dust or scratches on the record can be heard in the output, so this only true if you’ve got an absolutely pristine vinyl.
SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
This is what we were all told for years and years- that it was impossible that anyone could hear anything in vinyl that was supposed to be there but that couldn’t be reproduced with digital at cd quality. Then DVD came out And people could genuinely hear the difference from CD quality audio even in stereo. It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The original idea behind the superiority of vinyl was that the ambient audio was being recorded directly to the media. Of course, this wasn’t even true when it was first made, as they were using magnetic tape by then to record in analog. However, there is still some merit to the idea that an infinitesimal amount of quality is lost when translating sound waves to digital data.
Most of the actual differences between cd and vinyl, though, can be chalked up to the loudness wars ruining the mixes on cd.
tal@lemmy.today 1 day ago
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.
theverge.com/…/students-file-folder-directory-str…
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.
old.reddit.com/…/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_com…
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:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Critic…
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.
futatorius@lemm.ee 1 day ago
The abstraction away of the idea of files and folders is a deliberate user disempowerment strategy by app and mobile OS creators. The underlying concept is that the app owns the data, you don’t. It also conceals the fact that use of standard file formats and directory structure conventions were developed to facilitate interoperability: apps come and go, but the data was meant to live on regardless. Of course, vendors want to break interoperability since doing so enables lock-in. Even when the format of the underlying content is standarized, they’ll still try to fuck you over by imposing a proprietary metadata standard.
Just another example of enshittification at work.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This was actually something I found interesting with the brief TikTok shutdown in the US. A lot of creators only had their content in the editing software owned by TikTok or the app itself, meaning they lost access to all of their content.
The biggest risk of cloud only setups is you don’t own it.
MutilationWave@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I wouldn’t expect most users to understand how to use it, but has there not been a tiktok downloader made yet? If not that’s a good opportunity for someone looking for a project.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Current students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it’s been apps ever since.
Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.
FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 1 day ago
Even university students studying computer science don’t have this basic knowledge anymore.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
First people didn’t really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90’s when I was in school, we had a few years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just “know” computers (“digital native” and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don’t know how to use computers.
merc@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.
Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?
tal@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have a familiarity of a concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.
But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.
Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like
scpfrom there. A file manager. Open local video files inmpvor in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software (though…not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network).
I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the
file://URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale).
whostosay@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Godamn this made my job feel secure
dustyData@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ms 365 just assumes that your company has a Ms azure cloud solution, exchange server or just defaults to onedrive. You have to wrestle the software into giving you a local storage folder browser when picking the place to save a new document to. It’s frustrating.
cambridgeport90@techhub.social 19 hours ago
@dustyData Oh my gosh. I see this every single day at work. So many people have no idea where any of their documents are saved, until they can’t find them. I’ll be honest, I use a lot of streaming services for music as well, but I think I might actually go back to simply buying music. Who knows. Call me old-fashioned and only 35 years old, but I still see a point in local storage in traditional desktop type software. There’s not enough of it around here.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I owned Adobe CS 4. CS 5 and 6 had nothing new I needed. When my OS no longer supported CS 4, I purchased Affinity Suite; it still works great with no subscription or cloud hosting.
Back when the iTunes Music Store still existed, I took advantage of their feature to convert my library of audio to digitally mastered DRM-free 256 bit AAC. All my recordings of tapes and LPs replaced by professionally remastered tracks. Since then, I’ve supplemented with tracks purchased directly from the bands I’m interested in, plus some lower value stuff from YouTube.
In fact, the only cloud service I depend on is NextCloud, which I host myself, and which lives behind a VPN.
I run my own JellyFin server with all my DVD rips hosted on it. That’s a large part of my streaming video that I’d want to watch more than once.
Probably not a huge number of people do what I do, but enough to keep people employed who still make products you download once and enjoy forever.
MutilationWave@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I hear you for sure. I very much prefer local software and saved files local as well. The problem is there’s more money to be made doing it the other way. Unless it’s FOSS you can pretty much count on the company to follow the money.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
Slowly and gradually over time they evolved to the abstractions of directories listing files and other directories. I think in early Unix even a directory was a usual file, just differently interpreted.
Now, instead of teaching clueless people they’ve made a whole culture of computing for clueless people only, unfit for proper usage.
One might see how representation of something like a lent of objects is the flat layout again. At some point it doesn’t matter that there’s a normal filesystem under it, or something.
One might also see how using tags to somewhat organize objects into another lent is similar to a two-level layout, where a directory can only list files.
If one is going to consume content, okay, fine.
How would one know if they want to use computers seriously if they haven’t been taught, don’t know where to start teaching themselves, probably have, mild or not, executive dysfunction (a lot of conditions) and, if put in the right situation, would be very capable and interested, but in the wrong situation just can’t learn a single thing?
That was me, I could only reduce distractions and non-transparency after moving to Linux (and then OpenBSD, and then FreeBSD) with obscure WMs and setups. I’m born in 1996, so I had it easier.
btaf45@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories),
That is true for MS-DOS 1.0. But Unix had a tree structured directory system from the very beginning (early 1970s). And the directory listing command “ls” was basically the same in the first Unix 50 years ago as it is in modern Linux.
tal@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
The original Macintosh filesystem was flat, used for about two years around the mid-1980s. I don’t think I’ve ever used it, personally.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System
MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.
I thought that Apple ProDOS’s file system – late 1970s to early 1980s – was also flat, from memory. It looks like it was at one point, though they added hierarchical support to it later:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS
ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk’s storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128 KB or more of memory.
Looks like FAT, used by MS-DOS, early 1980s, also started out flat-file, then added hierarchical support:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) was introduced with PC DOS 2.0 as well, and this version also added read-only, archive, volume label, and directory attribute bits for hierarchical sub-directories.[24]
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 19 hours ago
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.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Underwaterbob@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
Anyone telling you they can hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and lossless audio is full of shit, anyway. It’s still a great format for keeping file sizes small, though I prefer ogg these days.
Cyber@feddit.uk 18 hours ago
I’m in the same boat: can’t hear any difference.
But, I have GBs of 320k MP3s… is it worth converting to Ogg ?
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 1 day ago
Doesn’t the iPod use AAC?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 day ago
iPhones use m4a these days for their native music app.
blackberry@midwest.social 1 day ago
do you think would influence developers to make their projects open source, with more leaning towards copy left licenses? they won’t make much money off the code alone anyways, so might as well try to make others not profit either
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
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? 🤷🏻♂️
DavidDoesLemmy@lemmynsfw.com 1 day ago
Opus is better in every way
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Opus is better in every way
Except ubiquitousness.
I can play an MP3 on any digital audio device made in the last 20 years.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I use a combination of mp3s and opus primarily but I can’t remember if opus is the open format ogg or not.
theangryseal@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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 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.
Rogue@feddit.uk 1 day ago
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?
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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
bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
… I’m out of the loop. Why don’t people care about mp3s?
HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
Its mostly been superseded by AAC, Opus and FLAC.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Mhmm I haven’t heard of the first two. I still listen to mp3s that I got from the 90s.
thechaoticchicken@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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!
ImageAnd 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
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 day ago
You can buy an external drive that plays both CD and DVD
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 20 hours ago
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
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I don’t use any one format. No idea what audio formats I have but probably a lot. Never cared, VLC takes them all.
westyvw@lemm.ee 19 hours ago
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.
lipilee@feddit.nl 1 day ago
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.
mlg@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 day ago
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.
TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
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.rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Laser@feddit.org 1 day ago
I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.
Unreal Tournament also used Vorbis starting from either 2003 or 2004.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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 for my purposes it’s totally fine.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I freaking love old time radio, that stuff is great!
aliceblossom@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Biggest free download site is probably www.oldradioworld.com
There’s also the Internet Archive - archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Check out the many OTR Gold podcasts that have the serialized shows as episodes.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The man with the action packed expense account.
dan1101@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.
nullPointer@programming.dev 1 day ago
the randomizer in my car sucks so it’s the same 100 of those 11,000 songs. :-/
Muffi@programming.dev 1 day ago
So not a much different experience than Spotify
the16bitgamer@programming.dev 1 day ago
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.
dan1101@lemm.ee 1 day ago
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.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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
Xanza@lemm.ee 1 day ago
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.
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Yeah it works. What’s the deal? You’ve got mp3s and then you got flac if you’re audiophile.
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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 to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.
muhyb@programming.dev 1 day ago
Well, most of my music collection lies as mp3. I care about metadata and all of them have tags. I would love to convert my collection to opus but first I need FLACs and an easy way to move over metadata, since vorbis is different than ID3tag. Do you know a streamlined way for this?
scripthook@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 1 day ago
My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 day ago
About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn’t grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and…get this…forked it! gasp!
Still to this day, I don’t see how Winamp didn’t see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn’t even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!
Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.
Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let’s take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID “HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???”
So that doesn’t seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.
Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don’t know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what’s the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don’t have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I’m not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.
So, if it wasn’t them being blundering idiots, and it wasn’t them deliberately doing this…what the fuck DID happen?
My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I use m4a format simply because my downloader uses that format. But I think m4a sound quality is better than mp3.
daggermoon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Mp3 has been dead to me for nearly a decade. Flac is superior in every way.
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I care, because I e been using streaming media fr quite a few years ears and not kept up with an changes
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
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.