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At last: MP3 Lossless!!!
Carol Haynes:
Am I the only one who thinks MP3 should've died a slow death by now?
-scancode (November 07, 2009, 11:56 AM)
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MP3 is ubiquitous so it is unlikely to die out any time soon. Whether MP3HD will make any headway is debatable but give than lossy MP3 is prrety standard on all mobile players it seems very unlikely that manufacturers will stop supporting the format.
Also there are millions of people who have purchased in MP3 format - its pretty unlikely that people will convert MP3 to something else and lose even more fiddelity (assuming most people are even capable of figuring out conversion processes).
40hz:
Am I the only one who thinks MP3 should've died a slow death by now?
-scancode (November 07, 2009, 11:56 AM)
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as someone who hasnt a clue I ask:
are there alternatives that dont involve huge filesizes - or should we just get used to large filesizes ?
(I know, there's loads of space on current hard-drives...)
-tomos (November 07, 2009, 02:42 PM)
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I think tomos hit on something with the observation about storage space.
Huge disk space has become so inexpensive that, for archival purposes, file compression has almost become a non-issue.
Nowadays, it's only if you're dealing with streaming media that file compression is still an important consideration.
CWuestefeld:
I know people like to hate MP3, in favor of OGG, FLAC, etc. But since I've upgraded to the latest LAME, I don't think it's worth worrying about at decent bitrates.
According to the LAME site (like this page: http://lame.sourceforge.net/gpsycho.php), the standard implementation that most encoders use is poor, and buggy on top of that. My personal experience when encoding my preferred genres (prog metal and power metal) is that the accuracy of top-rate VBR is actually superior to my audio equipment. Then nifty display of the encoder seems to bear this out: it's not showing much if any "overflow" data outside what fits inside the allocated frames.
I'm thinking that this is an example of something becoming ubiquitous because it's "good enough". Just like HTML has plenty of quirks, but gets the job done, and is now so entrenched that I can't imagine it going away, MP3 at a decent bitrate with a good encoder is just fine, and there's so much out there for it (both infrastructure and the music itself) that it's not going anywhere for some time.
skwire:
MP3 at a decent bitrate with a good encoder is just fine
-CWuestefeld (November 13, 2009, 12:37 PM)
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Agreed...and anybody that disputes this must prove it with an ABX test. :P
Innuendo:
MP3 at a decent bitrate with a good encoder is just fine, and there's so much out there for it (both infrastructure and the music itself) that it's not going anywhere for some time.-CWuestefeld (November 13, 2009, 12:37 PM)
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I don't think the point in using something like FLAC implies that MP3s are inherently bad. The point in using a lossless codec is for archival purposes. When MP3's lossy codec replacement comes along, and believe me sooner or later it will as progress is inevitable, those who have their music ripped to a lossless codec like FLAC can just transcode their music to the New Great Thing without having to spend all the time re-ripping their CDs. Transcoding is a lot faster than ripping. Transcoding an MP3 to a different lossy format is less than ideal as you will have the information in the music you lost while ripping to MP3 and then you'll have additional loss as you transcode to the new lossy codec.
Now if you want to leave lossless codecs out of the conversation & just talk about lossy codecs available now I think that someone who chooses Ogg Vorbis over MP3s may not even do it because of the sound quality, either. This person may choose Ogg Vorbis because they like to support the open source effort & maybe because the Ogg Vorbis tagging standard is more versatile than ID3 v2.3/v2.4/v.ad-nauseum.
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