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The same applies to OGG audio. Better than MP3 but the average user is unable to play it. So everybody just sticks to MP3.
by huuu 11y ago
The same applies to OGG audio. Better than MP3 but the average user is unable to play it. So everybody just sticks to MP3.
- danieltillett 11y agoMP3s with a decent bit rate is as good is it gets. Of course something like ogg back in the napster days would have been fantastic, but MP3 at 320 Kbps is fine for anyone who doesn't pay $1000 a meter for speaker wire.
- DanBC 11y agoBut MP3 was patent encumbered and so a bunch of music creation software had weird work-arounds.
- danieltillett 11y agoI am not sure what your point is? Yes MP3 files were not the right choice years ago, but today who cares.
- swhipple 11y agoIf I recall correctly, there are some alive patents in the U.S. until 2017 when dealing with MP3 encoders, requiring purchasing a license per copy distributed. The workaround that the parent is talking about is usually "get LAME from a different distributor", which is still done by Audacity and others.
- 1ris 11y agoThat's not true. MP3 simply never gets transparent and you can notice with 5 dollar in-ears. And people in general notice. This leads to absurdities such as bitrates of 320 kbps, even thou these do not sound significantly better than 128 kbps and are still not transparent. On the other hand 128 kbps AAC is transparent for almost any input. AAC is supported abou everywhere where mp3 is. The quality alone should be convincing. The smaller size make the usage of mp3 IMHO insane. OTOH "the scene" still does MPEG-2 releases I think.
- hussong 11y agoYou are making some bold statements about the general transparency of different audio formats that contradict pretty much everything I've read about this topic so far. Hence, I'd like to learn more, do you have any links that you would recommend?
- 1ris 11y agoWell, try it yourself :). Make sure to make it blind-test with the help of somebody else. Ideally such things would be subject to scientific studies. But these are kind of expensive and nobody cares for mp3 anyway. I'm not aware of any recent. Hydrogenaudio listening tests [1] are studies by volunteers, but they focus on non-transparent compression. Anyway, it also illustrate aswell how bad mp3 is. [1] http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Listening_Tests http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Lis...
- e12e 11y agoYou realize that that test doesn't test anywhere near 320kbps mp3, right?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 1ris 11y agoYes, that's what the last two sentences are about.
- danieltillett 11y agoThis page says at 128 Kbps all the encoders were the same (a 5 way tie). Their wiki says at 192 Kbps MP3 is transparent [1]. 1. http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Transparency http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Transparency
- danieltillett 11y agoI have listened to a lot of MP3 at different bit rates and with modern encoders and variable bit rates I can't tell the difference between anything above 160 Kbps - most of the time it is hard to tell the difference between 128kbp and anything higher. Really at 320kps you are entering the realm of fantasy if you think you can hear any difference.
- tomphoolery 11y agoFor those of us that sample from songs that we buy, WAVs are a bit easier to work with because the DAW doesn't have to spend time converting it. That said, since most of my tracks these days are using either the 48k or 96k sample rate, it still needs to be converted from 44.1 :)
- danieltillett 11y agoBut can you tell the difference between a variable encoded 320 Kbps MP3 using a modern encoder and a wav file? I have some reasonable equipment and I most definantly can't.
- krisdol 11y agoWhen I DJed I used a mix of FLAC files and 320 Kbps CBR and high level VBR. On performance equipment I could tell VBR was not holding up. There is also some quality loss that you encounter when slowing down MP3s that is not present for FLAC or WAV, especially when kept in key, but for the most part that is only audible beyond the 8-15% range, and it was not common to alter the tempo that much for me. I ended up settling mostly on FLAC when I can get it and 320 CBR otherwise. I don't think I ever heard the difference.
- danieltillett 11y agoCan you hear the difference between 320 Kbps CBR and VBR? I have to say I have never tried slowing down the music to try and hear the difference so it is possible under these conditions that it might make a difference.
- krisdol 11y agoI would say yes, but again, playing music at very amplified volumes and tweaking its tempo is not a common use-case.
- stcredzero 11y agoThe degree of difference depends on the kind of music you listen to. Live recordings of acoustic ensembles in airy cathedrals -- in that case you can tell the difference. On tracks that have a highly produced studio sound, where everything is an electronic instrument -- not going to be much of a difference.
- amluto 11y agoThat's the thing. With better formats, you don't need 320 kbps for transparency.
- hannob 11y agoWe have OGG opus these days which is even better than OGG vorbis.
- zanny 11y agoI actually tried this last year, and found out the hard way after reencoding my mp3 collection to vbr opus at around half the bitrate (I did some light quality testing to make sure it was of similar fidelity, of course you lose some quality going lossy -> lossy) that either opus-enc or gstreamer at the time would produce choppy broken audio. And it was reproducible on all my computers. I couldn't use my opus collection at all because either the encoder was broken or the playback was broken. I need to do it again at some point, when I have 8 hours to transcode everything and try again. See if they've fixed it.
- wooger 11y agoI'd expect similarly awful results for any lossy -> lossy transcoding. Don't ever do that. If you didn't rip CDs to lossless or buy lossless, you are stuck with the format you've got.