15 ms·

“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story

650 points by imartin2k 9y ago

Qwertious 9y ago
It's odd how this has hit the frontpage, but hasn't had a single comment on it yet.
- aluhut 9y ago
  Now it has two. I upvoted it because of the annoying articles and comments that came up regarding this. Going from the "I can hear the difference" to "It's dead now". This article points the facts out clearly and I don't see anything to discuss about there. MP3 isn't dead :)
- superflyguy 9y ago
  It's just your typical blog; not saying anything very new or interesting.
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    And yet it's on the frontpage. Like I said: odd.
djmobley 9y ago
It's not dead, although as storage prices continue to decline, one wonders why you would still compress audio you care about with a lossy codec.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Because you literally can't tell the difference.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    So long as it's high bitrate (like 320k), then most likely. If I play only 128k mp3s on a modern hi-fi system, I can tell the difference. I prefer FLAC myself. It's a little more space, but at least I know I have a real archive of a CD. I have rips of some good bands bands that never made it past the bar scene and who abandoned their MySpace pages long ago, so it's nice to know I have a preserved copy I can share with other audio-nerds.
    - kreetx 9y ago
      I dare you do blind tests! :) I also think the fact that the hi-fi system is modern has little to do with it.
      - usrusr 9y ago
        Depends. If the system more modern than actually hi-fi then chances are high that there is so much hidden DSP signal mangling that all the occlusions and illusions so carefully balanced by the encoder don't work half as good as expected.
        dTal 9y ago
        Absolutely this. mp3s wreak havoc with Pro Logic II decoders (stereo->surround processors), regardless of the bitrate, by stripping phase information which the DSP uses for sound steering. Also, the extra speakers allow you to spatially isolate sounds that would normally be masked - this can actually be a richer listening experience, but with lossy encoding it's a mess. More generally, this applies to any scenario where the sound is distorted or altered by something. A crappy speaker might have a perverse frequency response. A room reflection might manifest as a comb filter. Both will destroy the careful masking assumptions of any psychoacoustic model. Lossy compression should be avoided as an archival format whenever possible, even if you think you know better, because you never know when you might need the information you thoughtlessly threw away.
      - TillE 9y ago
        You really don't need blind testing to tell that 128kbps MP3s are awful. Certain common instruments will produce blatant artifacting all over the place. 128 is just barely good enough to be tolerable for a lot of people, but nobody would claim it's transparent. AAC does a lot better at that bitrate.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    It's not about audio quality alone, it's about collecting a flawless source. If you want or need your library in another format at some point you really should not transcode from a lossy source. You may say that won't ever happen, but storage is cheap it's very short sighted to risk being locked into one format. It's not something you could easily fix later.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      It might be short-sighted if the format doesn't have excellent open source decoders. MP3 won't die ever, because of LAME.
      - thirdsun 9y ago
        It likely won't, that's true. My point remains though: With storage that cheap and lossless audio sources widely available, why would you not use the lossless option?
        tfinniga 9y ago
        Why not both? MP3 is more widely supported than any lossless audio codec. Lossless compression enables the collector to keep an original. Not everyone is a collector though - for them, MP3 is probably fine, and if they need a different format later they'll probably just stream, re-encode, or re-purchase, in order of likelihood.
      - eikenberry 9y ago
        But you can covert to whatever lossless format you need without worry. Lossless to lossless conversion is possible an infinite number of times (theoretically), vs lossy to lossy you get maybe a couple for free.
        icebraining 9y ago
        As long as you keep the MP3s around, converting to any format for the 100th time is no lossier than the first time. What you need to avoid are chains of lossy formats.
  - la_oveja 9y ago
    I can tell the difference. And if used proper equipment you would too.
  - lmm 9y ago
    MP3 isn't transparent. The pre-echo artifact is inherent and unavoidable no matter how high a bitrate you use. And even if it were, that doesn't make it worthwhile. Gzip compresses plain text by a factor of 4 or 8 and is lossless in the absolute sense, but most of us don't keep our text files in .gz form.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Most of us don't have several hundred Gigabytes of textfiles though.
      - nebabyte 9y ago
        Most ;)
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      There are filesystems that transparently compress large text files. They're not in common use because CPU/disk IO is more expensive than disk space, and filesystem compression has fairly low yield on a standard desktop.
      - floatboth 9y ago
        Compression also means less disk I/O, not just space. I use ZFS and NTFS compression on all the things. For example, ~/.android on my desktop: "Size 1.49 GB, Size on disk 293 MB". Not everything compresses as nicely but in general you can save a lot of space on a desktop.
        Filligree 9y ago
        How do you check that for a single directory? I only know how to check for a filesystem or pool.
        floatboth 9y ago
        Yeah I don't know how to check that on ZFS. That result was from NTFS on Windows, I thought the phrase "Size on disk" was enough for everyone to tell it's Windows :D
  - eikenberry 9y ago
    Well, not the first listen. But after MP3s aren't supported anymore and you have to convert it to another lossy format you might start hearing the difference. The point of lossless formats are that you actually own an original. That you have a copy you should be able to convert to anything else no matter what the market trends.
    - josteink 9y ago
      > But after MP3s aren't supported anymore And how many decades from now do you expect that to be the situation?
      - Sean1708 9y ago
        You know what happened last time someone said that.
        josteink 9y ago
        No. Please enlighten me :)
        Sean1708 9y ago
        Y2k. I get what you're saying, MP3 is going to be around for a long time, but I really don't this whole craze of leaving future-proofing for the future is a good idea.
        josteink 9y ago
        Modern Linux machines still ship with FS drivers for Amiga filesystems, and have software to play MOD-files from the early 90s, despite nobody creating new music in that sequencer-format any more. I think MP3 and us are going to be fine for quite a while. This is after, all not a bug that needs to be fixed. Basically I don't think about this is a "problem" and this I don't agree about the "pushing it ahead of us" metaphor.
    - 9y ago
- libeclipse 9y ago
  Not everyone is an audiophile. If I want to store some really high quality audio, I'd use something like FLAC. But for general listening? Nah, MP3-320 is fine.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    V0 has replaced 320 for a while now
- mort96 9y ago
  The file size increase will continue to be an issue for a long time. As hard drive space started becoming cheap enough for PCs, people started wanting their songs on phones and MP3 players, where the storage was still expensive. As phones are now starting to get cheap enough internal storage for the flac file size not to matter, people are starting to stream music, where the file size is again important, as people are streaming music through cellular, where the price per gigabyte is still high. Maybe, once most people, even in the third world, have unlimited data plans, music file sizes will stop mattering. Or maybe we will have moved on to something else entirely where big files is still an issue. Maybe people will want to stream music from earth to space stations or lunar bases, I don't know.
  - wapz 9y ago
    I think storage on phones is a huge factor right now. A lot of the world is probably using phones with 8gb and 16gb of storage. That probably becomes ~1gb and ~9gb of free space after the OS. I'm not sure how much those countries influence the media format but even in the US a lot of people I know still have 16gb storage on their smartphones.
- Asooka 9y ago
  I recall an offhand comment from a source I can't remember¹ that some people when presented with mp3s encoded at various bitrates and flac encodings of the same song preferred low-bitrate mp3 above flac above high-bitrate mp3. The person theorised that it was because the low-bitrate encoding had more noise, which gave the sound additional texture. I draw an analogy with dithered palette images which can look different, but better, than full-colour images. ¹ Yes, this is the ultimate in unreliable anecdote, sorry.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Your analogy is quite apt.
  - nkristoffersen 9y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if people prefer the low bitrate MP3 songs because that's how they've always heard it. Most people have never heard "good" audio.
- floatboth 9y ago
  "Storage prices" are abstract; my phone's non-extendable 32 GB of storage are real. Compressing my library from iTunes AAC to lower-bitrate Opus made it more than two times smaller — down to 5 GB from 11.
- pizza234 9y ago
  I do because music collections still take large amounts of space in lossless formats.
- noway421 9y ago
  From another point of view, why would you care about compatibility across device if you are having control on what you are listening on.
- andybak 9y ago
  I can't fit a fraction of my collection on my mobile devices in a compressed form. Or my laptop. Moving to Flac would fill up almost my entire MacBook SSD.
libeclipse 9y ago
MP3 is really, really smart. Like seriously. Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death. It should be the opposite! It's now free for everyone and in the public domain, and that is cause for celebration.
- ygaf 9y ago
  It's a bit surreal. Engadget interprets "becoming patent-free" as "being retired". Gizmodo interprets it as "it's dead". We're not in a world where file format fanboys have the writing prowess to hold positions in the media right?
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    Not at all surreal when you keep in mind that the world turns on money. From that point of view MP3 is indeed dead.
    - the8472 9y ago
      Depends on whose money. For anyone who does not profit from those patents (>99.99% of the world) they'll save licence fees, which would mean more money for them.
      - ygaf 9y ago
        I think his implication is that patentholders encourage the support/use of the format, abstract as it is (a concrete example being PC vendors obliged to sell windows machines only).
    - ygaf 9y ago
      I see your point, but like the author I think mp3 has plenty of inertia even from this point in time. Even if I overestimate mp3 usage nowadays, those other journos are getting ahead of themselves.
  - omginternets 9y ago
    Betcha it generated a lot of clicks.
djsumdog 9y ago
Wait, people thought mp3 was dead because of that announcement?! O_o I feel like people have lost touch with the history and the entire reason many Linux distros do not distribute mp3 codecs! Some of these writers/editors really need to spend each day reading at least one headline from that day in 2016, 2015 .. all the way back to 1999. MP3 is now more free/libre, or at least when it comes to encoding/decoding. Patents are one of the reasons people have been so hesitant about H.264 and why we see things like WebM. Personally, I've encoded in FLAC for years, and even in the early days (2003-ish) I was backing up CDs to oggs instead of mp3s. Unless you're really concerned about space today, download your music in a lossless format. Sites like Bandcamp and CDBaby now support lossless (FLAC and ALAC)
- Bahamut 9y ago
  I still use mp3s - compatibility is generally better than any other format and take up a more reasonable amount of space than lossless formats. I really don't hear a difference between an mp3 and a lossless version, and that is with a much better ear than most non-musically trained (I have given useful critiques to artists on WIPs related to mixing & mastering). In addition, I have over 1 TB of music that is almost wholly mp3s - it's not terribly practical for me to have that in lossless either.
  - ido 9y ago
    I've heard some explanations on why lossless is different even tho the stuff cut out of high quality MP3/ogg is in frequency we don't hear, but it honestly sounds like "high end cables/pure gold contacts" to me.
    - discreditable 9y ago
      I don't store lossless because I think I sounds better. The idea for me is I can transcode to whatever format I need without generational quality loss.
    - ordu 9y ago
      At high bitrates maybe mp3 has the same heard quality. But mp3 has his artifacts, and the problem is if you heard them once, you couldn't stop youself from hearing them every time. It's like interlacing in movies or bugs at borders of contrasting areas of picture in jpeg. And yes, this can be proved by double-blind experiment at least for 128 kbit/s mp3. With 192 kbit/s, I believe, you can hear artifacts also, but you would need some special training for it. So with 192 kbit/s solution is simple: just do not teach youself to hear artifacts. With lower bitrates it's not so simple. As for me, flac is better for storing sounds. Stored flac has no artifacts (if obtained without them), I can recode it to mp3, vorbis, opus or something else, and get artifacts from that codec, but not artifacts from mp3 plus artifacts from that codec.
beedogs 9y ago
It bugs me that "reputable" news outlets like Fortune Magazine were running stories which essentially amounted to a Fraunhofer press release with a couple of paragraphs tacked onto it. Clearly there's absolutely no effort involved in being a journalist anymore.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  Journalism is dead.
  - Bakary 9y ago
    Full length stories and analysis are still very much in demand, but the actual news communication aspect of the profession is indeed doomed.
- elementalest 9y ago
  One has to wonder if its actually just an AI doing web scraps looking for 'news' and posting a summary or just direct excerpts from the source. Then changing/adding a few things it knows are clickbait/headliners. If this isn't being done, it seems like something that could potentially be achieved with current tech, if not now, then in the near future.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  > It bugs me that "reputable" news outlets like Fortune Magazine were running stories which essentially amounted to a Fraunhofer You skipped a chapter on the history of the web. Formerly "reputable" outlets have transitioned to rubberstamping their brand on any blogger they think can help them preserve their business model, so while they might admittedly still be frontrunners in name recognition and still have credibility in narrower contexts, they have all but morphed into full-time clickbait farms.
pervycreeper 9y ago
Related: I haven't heard whether popular free software such as Audacity, Linux distros, etc. will begin including LAME binaries by default as a result of the patent expiry. Anyone know if such plans exist?
- boredpudding 9y ago
  Linux distro's are starting doing it right now. Not sure about Audacity, but I guess that will be the same.
- _ZeD_ 9y ago
  well, for one example, have a look at http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64 http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64 - specifically +--------------------------+ Sat May 6 23:12:02 UTC 2017 a/glibc-solibs-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. ap/cdrdao-1.2.3-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. ap/sox-14.4.2-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. d/flex-2.6.4-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. kde/k3b-2.0.3-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt. Patched to build with ffmpeg3 and gcc7. l/ffmpeg-3.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. l/glibc-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. Reverted a patch that causes IFUNC errors to be emitted. l/glibc-i18n-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. l/glibc-profile-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. l/gst-plugins-base-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/gst-plugins-good-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/gst-plugins-libav-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/gstreamer-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/lame-3.99.5-x86_64-1.txz: Added. xap/MPlayer-1.3_20170208-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. xap/audacious-plugins-3.8.2-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
- splatcollision 9y ago
  I recently installed Audacity on a new machine and was pleasantly surprised to not have to poke around and drop the LAME libs manually for it to work with MP3.
ytch 9y ago
AAC was released in 1997, why they start to advocate AAC after MP3's patent is expired? I thought they state "MP3 is dead" just because its patent is expired, while AAC isn't: http://www.via-corp.com/us/en/licensing/aac/licensefees.html http://www.via-corp.com/us/en/licensing/aac/licensefees.html
mavhc 9y ago
MP3 isn't dead, just journalism
- rplst8 9y ago
  This is the truest statement in the whole thread.
  - charlesism 9y ago
    Yep. To take "MP3 encoding is now free for anyone to use!" and turn it into "MP3 is dead!" is one of the worst cases of bad reporting this year.
- batushka 9y ago
  The facts are true, the news is fake.
alsadi 9y ago
I wrote a similar article in Arabic. yes, because MP3 is now similar to public domain it does not mean it's dead. only the business of patent trolls behind it is dead. http://g0alkeeper.blogspot.com/2017/05/mp3.html http://g0alkeeper.blogspot.com/2017/05/mp3.html
- kuschku 9y ago
  It's not really a business of patent trolls. It's the unfortunate effect that the German research organisation that developed it only finances all their research with patents.
- stannol 9y ago
  The Fraunhofer Society is not and never was a "patent troll". They do actual research and one of their income sources is licensing the resulting patents.
  - nailer 9y ago
    Fraunhofer put the source online without a license at the ISO site, let the community convince itself that MP3 was a standard and therefore unpatented, let the community write all the encoders and decoders and surrounding tools for years, then turned around and asked everyone who made their file format popular for 10K USD.
    - alsadi 9y ago
      Troll is a gentle word, the author of ffmpeg describe patents of software as "gangsters asking for protection money". All software patents are bad see my reply above http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.h...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- germanier 9y ago
  There are many examples of patent trolls but this isn't one. MP3 was new, innovative, and the result of long effort. The patent fees directly funded new research of even better technology. That's the patent system working as designed. I just read your blog post through Google Translate. You seem to claim that they patented the use of Fourier transform for storage of music. This is not what happened at all. The patent was granted for specifying which part of the Fourier transform can safely be discarded for storage (and reconstructed while playback) without harming the sound you hear too much. That's not something they just looked up in a 200-year-old book but took more than a decade of complex research. The result of this research is their actual product and it's a highly valuable one.
lloeki 9y ago
> AAC and other newer audio codecs can produce better quality than MP3, but the difference is only significant at low bitrates. At about 128 kbps or greater, the differences between MP3 and other codecs are very unlikely to be noticed, so it isn’t meaningfully better for personal music collections. This is patently false unless you listen on bad audio gear (bad DAC, bad cans). I don't even have serious equipment (MBP+iPhone so guess about the DAC, as for headphones: AKG k514 mkII, Sennheiser Momentum (over ear), SoundMagic E10 (intra), Marshall Monitor (not mine), BeyerDynamic DT 770 250Ω (not mine)) and the difference is downright obvious going from 128k to 256k almost whatever the place and definitely noticeable on select features from 256k to 320k. Some corner-case audio patterns are just known to make MP3 encoders choke whatever the bitrate (a higher bitrate merely mitigates the problem for MP3), while they pass with flying colours on AAC. Sadly those corner cases are not just theoretical and have a real effect for some songs. At 320k though it won't make the song any less enjoyable (which is another metric entirely) but it can definitely be noticed (which is what the article claims).
- untangle 9y ago
  The author claimed that codec choice matters little >128k, not that 128k is of equal SQ to 256k. BTW, if you can easily discern 256k from 320k, I'd venture to guess that you are a 1% "golden ear" listener. OTOH, even my 60yo ears can tell 128k from 256k.
  - lloeki 9y ago
    I understood that but didn't made it point clear: my point is that it matters in a bit more nuanced way. I'll use [0] as some sort of visual support to help transcribe how I perceive it: - 128k MP3 is like watching a Q=10 JPEG (artefacts and blockiness all over the place) while 128k AAC is much more like Q=50 (artefacting is much much more local, like the little grass patch on the left side of the stone) - 256k MP3 is generally great but still has artefacts happen occasionally in some local, specific areas, similar to Q=50 (but not in the same way as 128k AAC), and definitely not on all songs, while 256k AAC is very close to perfect in any situation. - 320k MP3 is very close to perfect save from very specific (and rare!) pathological corner cases that throws encoders off (like you have to have some specific bass line and some footwork on the bass drum and some very specific cymbal then the cymbal gets subtly crashy and noisy while the bass work gets subtly glitchy and muddled), which doesn't happen with AAC. Yes I've double blind-tested this with a friend who did not believe me, and used multiple MP3 encoders for that. So to sum things up: MP3 AAC 128k annoying enjoyable 256k excellent awesome 320k superb Those being ordered this way: annoying < enjoyable < excellent < superb < awesome It's not much that I have some "golden ear" that I've been trained into looking for some patterns when I was studying DSP and now that I know what to look for they just annoyingly pop out. It's a bit like watching logs fly by just fast enough that you can't read them yet spot some oddity and just go "wait, there was something right there", and should you scroll back, sure enough, here's the deal standing out like a sore thumb. Taking a bet that audio equipment gets better and cheaper with time I'd rather have a reasonable quality as a source, especially in light to the storage space and general bandwidth we have at our disposal. Then again in an increasingly streaming world we don't get much in the way of a choice whether it's about formats themselves or encoders. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Sample_photographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Sample_photographs
intoverflow2 9y ago
Honestly I'm looking forward to Spotify running out of money and shutting down so this generation will wake up that they need to start duplicating and archiving their media before they lose it. Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers. (I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche that it was 5-10 years ago)
- thirdsun 9y ago
  Thank you - my thoughts exactly. As an avid music collector and listener I understand that my interest in this issue probably isn't comparable to most other people, but I think there's no doubt that licensing deals will change/end and music starts to disappear from streaming services. There are already and always have been large gaps in the streaming catalogs but those are mostly releases that have never been there in the first place. I guess it will be different when John Doe sees his Spotify library shrinking and realizes that he was just renting all this music.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Can I plug something to you guys? I'm the same as you, I like collecting and listening to music, and I was tired at how fragile playlists are. If you move some files or rename them, they break. So, I wrote a spec for a new format, which is resilient to pretty much all operations: http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/ http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/ I'm currently writing a plugin for beets, but if anyone wants to help out with implementing an import/export plugin for a music player with library functionality, I would love that. I'm basically trying to scratch my own itch here, and hopefully one that many other people have.
    - thirdsun 9y ago
      You're right. Migrating playlist from one platform, or just a player, to another is huge problem. Keeping them in sync seems impossible. A universal cross-platform playlist format seems like a much needed feature, but I don't se ehow this could work without significant changes in every supported player/software. Here's a very real playlist issue I'm facing right now: I use Roon as my main audio player / music management solution. Roon manages my library which is located on a NAS. I have a few playlists created there, but no way to sync them to my iPhone unless I manage a separate playlist in iTunes which has access to the very same NAS library. It's not a deal breaker since I'm used to playlists being software-specific. Unfortunately I don't see that changing anytime since everyone's answer to this problem seems to be using one single streaming service - a solution which, frankly, handles this particular problem very well, but doesn't work for me due to disadvantages of streaming discussed earlier in this thread.
hannob 9y ago
Not sure how the author comes to the conclusion that opus isn't widely supported. Opus is supported in all major webbrowsers and natively in modern Android systems. I'd call that widely supported.
- libeclipse 9y ago
  I guess it's relative. Compared to MP3, a lot of stuff could be considered "not widely supported".
- Yaggo 9y ago
  > Opus is supported in all major webbrowsers and natively in modern Android systems. I'd call that widely supported. http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus Not supported in Safari. I guess the reason is that iOS devices don't have hardware encoder for it and Apple doesn't want to compromise battery life (maybe marginal issue with audio, but big issue with webm).
  - jhasse 9y ago
    > I guess the reason is that iOS devices don't have hardware encoder for it and Apple doesn't want to compromise battery life (maybe marginal issue with audio, but big issue with webm). I rather think that Apple doesn't like the idea of royalty-free codecs which would make it easier for free operation systems to support multimedia on the web. AAC helps to keep you locked into macOS or Windows, because it works out-of-the-box there (in contrast to Linux distributions like Fedora).
    - brainfire 9y ago
      On the other hand, the only audio format I'm aware of Apple inventing in the last 20 years is royalty-free and available under the Apache license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless
      - jhasse 9y ago
S_A_P 9y ago
As a former cakewalk software user it used to piss me off royally that I had to pay for the MP3 license to unlock the feature. It was a trivial amount (19bucks?) and I understand why they thought it was a good idea(their way of sticking it to Fraunhofer, and a ridiculous fee) but it ended up feeling like the customer that just spent 500 bucks on software was the one getting screwed especially considering how much cross licensing cakewalk did/does.
theandrewbailey 9y ago
I think the contrary, I can see MP3 getting even more popular now that it has no patents.
lholden 9y ago
MP3 has been "dead" to me ever since the non patent encumbered formats started becoming popular. Mind you, I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since the mid 90s... So I have a vested interest in open formats. These days, all my music is in a lossless format anyway. Especially now that my phone has enough storage space for it. Anyhow. I'd say that if anything... The patents expiring way the heck sooner would have been healthy for the format.
sitkack 9y ago
You know what needs to be resurrected? MPEG1 Video Codec. It scales to 4k x 4k and very soon to be patent free.
- sitkack 9y ago
  https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg
- toyg 9y ago
  There is a bunch of early-internet tech that will soon get out of patent locks, it could lead to a new Golden Age.
sevensor 9y ago
MP3 is now as dead as the GIF. Why, I haven't seen a GIF for at least... 15 seconds. At any rate, (pun intended), I'm perfectly happy with my vorbis files and not in any hurry to convert to MP3. But I'm glad I don't have to worry about the silly patent any longer.
kozak 9y ago
A big argument for using lossless instead of lossy are Bluetooth headphones. When you're listening through them, you're essentially re-encoding one lossy format into another lossy format, which degrades the quality much more than each of the formats does by itself.
- mark-r 9y ago
  I simply refuse to use Bluetooth headphones. Problem solved.
smaili 9y ago
Long live the MIDI!
zecg 9y ago
Finally, LAME can become LIME.
kazinator 9y ago
> AAC makes a lot of sense for low- and medium-quality applications where bandwidth is extremely limited or expensive, like phone calls and music-streaming services, or as sound for video, for which it’s the most widely supported format. Nope; you can scratch "phone calls" from that list. AAC (specifically, the AAC-LD variant) is not the best for low bitrate calls; you want a dedicated voice codec for that application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC-LD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC-LD AAC-LD is only geared toward voice in one parameter: frame size. It's basically just a "look, AAC can do this too if you want" feature. Look at the remark there: "It can use a bit rate of 32 - 64kbit/s or higher". That's a whopping lot. 32 kbps is about the far-out upper bound on bit rate for using a voice codec. You can get very good call quality at half that. http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ Basically if you look at all the options for compressing speech in telephony, AAC doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- phkahler 9y ago
  I thought Opus was technically fine for phone and able to compete on quality. IIRC it only suffers from lack of use. On paper it seems to be the universal codec for audio.
  - mentalpiracy 9y ago
    Opus is the default voice codec for Discord, and also available as a codec option for Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers. Anecdotally, the sound quality is above and beyond what I get on my cell, without question.
    - thescriptkiddie 9y ago
      Don't forget Mumble! Also Slack, apparently.
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  Its going to be hard to beat G.729's 6-8kbps bitrate. I can barely hear the difference between G.729 and G.711 on our voip system.
Markoff 9y ago
TIL MP3 is only one year younger than JPEG, or considering i was using JPEG daily years before MP3 took off, I remember Winamp version 1
isk517 9y ago
So many people here do not want to face the reality that MP3 is dead. I know, my dad who worked in the MP3 factory for 20 years was laid off last week just after the last MP3 came off the assembly line. I suspect the more entrepreneurial amongst you here may want to start scouring peoples Recycling Bins for old MP3s that you can break down into replacement parts to sell to collectors.
- cowardlydragon 9y ago
  I'm wondering if this is just reporting incompetence, or a symptom of the appalling degree of corporate influence on all modern for-profit reporting organizations. As usual I'll side with the conspiratorial. Similar to oligarchical government: an issue only has a chance if it has a corporation behind it, and a looming infringement of freedom is only stopped if a set of corporations oppose it.
- phoenixProgram 9y ago
  good riddance. they sound terrible. maybe we can go back to trading cassette tapes by carrier pigeon
- globuous 9y ago
  By mp3, do you mean .mp3, the audio file format, or an mp3 player ? Because the way I understand it, the article talks about the file format, not the hardware.
  - news_to_me 9y ago
    I think it's a joke
  - joehart42 9y ago
    Whoosh
- toyg 9y ago
  Netcraft confirms it, MP3 is dead.
Millennium 9y ago
I'm looking at the Tunequest list at http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/ http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/, and it looks to me like patents #5,924,060 and #5,703,999 (the last two listed) shouldn't expire for a few months yet. Is that list mistaken?
shmerl 9y ago
Well, it's not not patent incumbered, but there is no need to use it for anything besides playback of existing legacy media that doesn't have a lossless original. Otherwise just use Opus for playback purposes.
LeoNatan25 9y ago
Disagree with the author on the technical merits that AAC only sounds marginally better than MP3 at 128kbps and higher. For certain audio shapes, MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some extent JPEG for some image shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results due to different compression mechanics. Much like MPEG4 ASP and MPEG4 AVC and HEVC produce different compression artifacts, with ASP having much worse artifacts.
- pizza234 9y ago
  > For certain audio shapes, MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some extent JPEG for some image shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results due to different compression mechanics. Do you base this assertion on blind testing? I'd really like to know how much of the people that says "MP3 sounds X/Y/Z" actually did one (actually, I'd like all of them to actually do one), because in the blind tests I've participated/seen participating, with a modern encoder and mid/high bitrate (in the average range of 192/224 kbits) users were systematically not able to hear any difference. Of course I found some exceptions; for example, a friend of mine had good hearing on high frequencies, therefore, he could immediately spot 128 kbps CBR mp3s which have a lowpass threshold at ~16 khz.
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    I think I fall within that latter category. I have done tests myself, in an environment I feel relaxed in and comfortable, and have been able to hear the difference. I also hear the difference going a step above, with lossless.
jjawssd 9y ago
Can the Opus codec be emulated with asmjs in Safari or iOS?
- derf_ 9y ago
  You may be interested in the following project from the Wikimedia Foundation: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/ https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/
tibu 9y ago
http://mp3.isdead.fyi/ http://mp3.isdead.fyi/
Nano2rad 9y ago
Frauhofer announcement did not mention expiry of patents.
darklajid 9y ago
Tangentially related: Being out of touch with the podcast scene for quite a while I was interested to follow the 'Overcast' link. Unfortunately that turned out to be for platforms I don't own. If there are some passionate podcast listeners here, 1) do you have recommendations for an alternative to Overcast (ideally cross-platform, Android/Linux required, Windows desirable)? 2) can you recommend HN related (overlapping with the content here) podcasts?
- QuicksilverJohn 9y ago
  1) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod
ksec 9y ago
AAC was introduced in 1997, does any one know when will its patents expire as well? And we haven't had any improvement in Audio compression since then. MP3 - AAC and That is it. All the others are at best AAC similar quality / bitrate. At 256Kbps, the majority couldn't hear a difference between MP3 and AAC. At 128Kbps it is only slightly better. We dont have anything like HEVC which is an order of magnitude better then, say MPEG-2 at low bitrate.

650 points by imartin2k 9y ago

Qwertious 9y ago

It's odd how this has hit the frontpage, but hasn't had a single comment on it yet.

aluhut 9y ago
Now it has two. I upvoted it because of the annoying articles and comments that came up regarding this. Going from the "I can hear the difference" to "It's dead now". This article points the facts out clearly and I don't see anything to discuss about there. MP3 isn't dead :)
superflyguy 9y ago
It's just your typical blog; not saying anything very new or interesting.
- Qwertious 9y ago
  And yet it's on the frontpage. Like I said: odd.

djmobley 9y ago

It's not dead, although as storage prices continue to decline, one wonders why you would still compress audio you care about with a lossy codec.

adrianN 9y ago
Because you literally can't tell the difference.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  So long as it's high bitrate (like 320k), then most likely. If I play only 128k mp3s on a modern hi-fi system, I can tell the difference. I prefer FLAC myself. It's a little more space, but at least I know I have a real archive of a CD. I have rips of some good bands bands that never made it past the bar scene and who abandoned their MySpace pages long ago, so it's nice to know I have a preserved copy I can share with other audio-nerds.
  - kreetx 9y ago
    I dare you do blind tests! :) I also think the fact that the hi-fi system is modern has little to do with it.
    - usrusr 9y ago
      Depends. If the system more modern than actually hi-fi then chances are high that there is so much hidden DSP signal mangling that all the occlusions and illusions so carefully balanced by the encoder don't work half as good as expected.
      - dTal 9y ago
        Absolutely this. mp3s wreak havoc with Pro Logic II decoders (stereo->surround processors), regardless of the bitrate, by stripping phase information which the DSP uses for sound steering. Also, the extra speakers allow you to spatially isolate sounds that would normally be masked - this can actually be a richer listening experience, but with lossy encoding it's a mess. More generally, this applies to any scenario where the sound is distorted or altered by something. A crappy speaker might have a perverse frequency response. A room reflection might manifest as a comb filter. Both will destroy the careful masking assumptions of any psychoacoustic model. Lossy compression should be avoided as an archival format whenever possible, even if you think you know better, because you never know when you might need the information you thoughtlessly threw away.
    - TillE 9y ago
      You really don't need blind testing to tell that 128kbps MP3s are awful. Certain common instruments will produce blatant artifacting all over the place. 128 is just barely good enough to be tolerable for a lot of people, but nobody would claim it's transparent. AAC does a lot better at that bitrate.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  It's not about audio quality alone, it's about collecting a flawless source. If you want or need your library in another format at some point you really should not transcode from a lossy source. You may say that won't ever happen, but storage is cheap it's very short sighted to risk being locked into one format. It's not something you could easily fix later.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    It might be short-sighted if the format doesn't have excellent open source decoders. MP3 won't die ever, because of LAME.
    - thirdsun 9y ago
      It likely won't, that's true. My point remains though: With storage that cheap and lossless audio sources widely available, why would you not use the lossless option?
      - tfinniga 9y ago
        Why not both? MP3 is more widely supported than any lossless audio codec. Lossless compression enables the collector to keep an original. Not everyone is a collector though - for them, MP3 is probably fine, and if they need a different format later they'll probably just stream, re-encode, or re-purchase, in order of likelihood.
    - eikenberry 9y ago
      But you can covert to whatever lossless format you need without worry. Lossless to lossless conversion is possible an infinite number of times (theoretically), vs lossy to lossy you get maybe a couple for free.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        As long as you keep the MP3s around, converting to any format for the 100th time is no lossier than the first time. What you need to avoid are chains of lossy formats.
- la_oveja 9y ago
  I can tell the difference. And if used proper equipment you would too.
- lmm 9y ago
  MP3 isn't transparent. The pre-echo artifact is inherent and unavoidable no matter how high a bitrate you use. And even if it were, that doesn't make it worthwhile. Gzip compresses plain text by a factor of 4 or 8 and is lossless in the absolute sense, but most of us don't keep our text files in .gz form.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Most of us don't have several hundred Gigabytes of textfiles though.
    - nebabyte 9y ago
      Most ;)
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    There are filesystems that transparently compress large text files. They're not in common use because CPU/disk IO is more expensive than disk space, and filesystem compression has fairly low yield on a standard desktop.
    - floatboth 9y ago
      Compression also means less disk I/O, not just space. I use ZFS and NTFS compression on all the things. For example, ~/.android on my desktop: "Size 1.49 GB, Size on disk 293 MB". Not everything compresses as nicely but in general you can save a lot of space on a desktop.
      - Filligree 9y ago
        How do you check that for a single directory? I only know how to check for a filesystem or pool.
        floatboth 9y ago
        Yeah I don't know how to check that on ZFS. That result was from NTFS on Windows, I thought the phrase "Size on disk" was enough for everyone to tell it's Windows :D
- eikenberry 9y ago
  Well, not the first listen. But after MP3s aren't supported anymore and you have to convert it to another lossy format you might start hearing the difference. The point of lossless formats are that you actually own an original. That you have a copy you should be able to convert to anything else no matter what the market trends.
  - josteink 9y ago
    > But after MP3s aren't supported anymore And how many decades from now do you expect that to be the situation?
    - Sean1708 9y ago
      You know what happened last time someone said that.
      - josteink 9y ago
        No. Please enlighten me :)
        Sean1708 9y ago
        Y2k. I get what you're saying, MP3 is going to be around for a long time, but I really don't this whole craze of leaving future-proofing for the future is a good idea.
        josteink 9y ago
        Modern Linux machines still ship with FS drivers for Amiga filesystems, and have software to play MOD-files from the early 90s, despite nobody creating new music in that sequencer-format any more. I think MP3 and us are going to be fine for quite a while. This is after, all not a bug that needs to be fixed. Basically I don't think about this is a "problem" and this I don't agree about the "pushing it ahead of us" metaphor.
  - 9y ago
libeclipse 9y ago
Not everyone is an audiophile. If I want to store some really high quality audio, I'd use something like FLAC. But for general listening? Nah, MP3-320 is fine.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  V0 has replaced 320 for a while now
mort96 9y ago
The file size increase will continue to be an issue for a long time. As hard drive space started becoming cheap enough for PCs, people started wanting their songs on phones and MP3 players, where the storage was still expensive. As phones are now starting to get cheap enough internal storage for the flac file size not to matter, people are starting to stream music, where the file size is again important, as people are streaming music through cellular, where the price per gigabyte is still high. Maybe, once most people, even in the third world, have unlimited data plans, music file sizes will stop mattering. Or maybe we will have moved on to something else entirely where big files is still an issue. Maybe people will want to stream music from earth to space stations or lunar bases, I don't know.
- wapz 9y ago
  I think storage on phones is a huge factor right now. A lot of the world is probably using phones with 8gb and 16gb of storage. That probably becomes ~1gb and ~9gb of free space after the OS. I'm not sure how much those countries influence the media format but even in the US a lot of people I know still have 16gb storage on their smartphones.
Asooka 9y ago
I recall an offhand comment from a source I can't remember¹ that some people when presented with mp3s encoded at various bitrates and flac encodings of the same song preferred low-bitrate mp3 above flac above high-bitrate mp3. The person theorised that it was because the low-bitrate encoding had more noise, which gave the sound additional texture. I draw an analogy with dithered palette images which can look different, but better, than full-colour images. ¹ Yes, this is the ultimate in unreliable anecdote, sorry.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Your analogy is quite apt.
- nkristoffersen 9y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if people prefer the low bitrate MP3 songs because that's how they've always heard it. Most people have never heard "good" audio.
floatboth 9y ago
"Storage prices" are abstract; my phone's non-extendable 32 GB of storage are real. Compressing my library from iTunes AAC to lower-bitrate Opus made it more than two times smaller — down to 5 GB from 11.
pizza234 9y ago
I do because music collections still take large amounts of space in lossless formats.
noway421 9y ago
From another point of view, why would you care about compatibility across device if you are having control on what you are listening on.
andybak 9y ago
I can't fit a fraction of my collection on my mobile devices in a compressed form. Or my laptop. Moving to Flac would fill up almost my entire MacBook SSD.

libeclipse 9y ago

MP3 is really, really smart. Like seriously. Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death. It should be the opposite! It's now free for everyone and in the public domain, and that is cause for celebration.

ygaf 9y ago
It's a bit surreal. Engadget interprets "becoming patent-free" as "being retired". Gizmodo interprets it as "it's dead". We're not in a world where file format fanboys have the writing prowess to hold positions in the media right?
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Not at all surreal when you keep in mind that the world turns on money. From that point of view MP3 is indeed dead.
  - the8472 9y ago
    Depends on whose money. For anyone who does not profit from those patents (>99.99% of the world) they'll save licence fees, which would mean more money for them.
    - ygaf 9y ago
      I think his implication is that patentholders encourage the support/use of the format, abstract as it is (a concrete example being PC vendors obliged to sell windows machines only).
  - ygaf 9y ago
    I see your point, but like the author I think mp3 has plenty of inertia even from this point in time. Even if I overestimate mp3 usage nowadays, those other journos are getting ahead of themselves.
- omginternets 9y ago
  Betcha it generated a lot of clicks.

djsumdog 9y ago

Wait, people thought mp3 was dead because of that announcement?! O_o I feel like people have lost touch with the history and the entire reason many Linux distros do not distribute mp3 codecs! Some of these writers/editors really need to spend each day reading at least one headline from that day in 2016, 2015 .. all the way back to 1999. MP3 is now more free/libre, or at least when it comes to encoding/decoding. Patents are one of the reasons people have been so hesitant about H.264 and why we see things like WebM. Personally, I've encoded in FLAC for years, and even in the early days (2003-ish) I was backing up CDs to oggs instead of mp3s. Unless you're really concerned about space today, download your music in a lossless format. Sites like Bandcamp and CDBaby now support lossless (FLAC and ALAC)

Bahamut 9y ago
I still use mp3s - compatibility is generally better than any other format and take up a more reasonable amount of space than lossless formats. I really don't hear a difference between an mp3 and a lossless version, and that is with a much better ear than most non-musically trained (I have given useful critiques to artists on WIPs related to mixing & mastering). In addition, I have over 1 TB of music that is almost wholly mp3s - it's not terribly practical for me to have that in lossless either.
- ido 9y ago
  I've heard some explanations on why lossless is different even tho the stuff cut out of high quality MP3/ogg is in frequency we don't hear, but it honestly sounds like "high end cables/pure gold contacts" to me.
  - discreditable 9y ago
    I don't store lossless because I think I sounds better. The idea for me is I can transcode to whatever format I need without generational quality loss.
  - ordu 9y ago
    At high bitrates maybe mp3 has the same heard quality. But mp3 has his artifacts, and the problem is if you heard them once, you couldn't stop youself from hearing them every time. It's like interlacing in movies or bugs at borders of contrasting areas of picture in jpeg. And yes, this can be proved by double-blind experiment at least for 128 kbit/s mp3. With 192 kbit/s, I believe, you can hear artifacts also, but you would need some special training for it. So with 192 kbit/s solution is simple: just do not teach youself to hear artifacts. With lower bitrates it's not so simple. As for me, flac is better for storing sounds. Stored flac has no artifacts (if obtained without them), I can recode it to mp3, vorbis, opus or something else, and get artifacts from that codec, but not artifacts from mp3 plus artifacts from that codec.

beedogs 9y ago

It bugs me that "reputable" news outlets like Fortune Magazine were running stories which essentially amounted to a Fraunhofer press release with a couple of paragraphs tacked onto it. Clearly there's absolutely no effort involved in being a journalist anymore.

kalleboo 9y ago
Journalism is dead.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Full length stories and analysis are still very much in demand, but the actual news communication aspect of the profession is indeed doomed.
elementalest 9y ago
One has to wonder if its actually just an AI doing web scraps looking for 'news' and posting a summary or just direct excerpts from the source. Then changing/adding a few things it knows are clickbait/headliners. If this isn't being done, it seems like something that could potentially be achieved with current tech, if not now, then in the near future.
nebabyte 9y ago
> It bugs me that "reputable" news outlets like Fortune Magazine were running stories which essentially amounted to a Fraunhofer You skipped a chapter on the history of the web. Formerly "reputable" outlets have transitioned to rubberstamping their brand on any blogger they think can help them preserve their business model, so while they might admittedly still be frontrunners in name recognition and still have credibility in narrower contexts, they have all but morphed into full-time clickbait farms.

pervycreeper 9y ago

Related: I haven't heard whether popular free software such as Audacity, Linux distros, etc. will begin including LAME binaries by default as a result of the patent expiry. Anyone know if such plans exist?

boredpudding 9y ago
Linux distro's are starting doing it right now. Not sure about Audacity, but I guess that will be the same.
_ZeD_ 9y ago
well, for one example, have a look at http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64 http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64 - specifically +--------------------------+ Sat May 6 23:12:02 UTC 2017 a/glibc-solibs-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. ap/cdrdao-1.2.3-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. ap/sox-14.4.2-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. d/flex-2.6.4-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. kde/k3b-2.0.3-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt. Patched to build with ffmpeg3 and gcc7. l/ffmpeg-3.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. l/glibc-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. Reverted a patch that causes IFUNC errors to be emitted. l/glibc-i18n-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. l/glibc-profile-2.25-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. l/gst-plugins-base-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/gst-plugins-good-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/gst-plugins-libav-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/gstreamer-1.12.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/lame-3.99.5-x86_64-1.txz: Added. xap/MPlayer-1.3_20170208-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. xap/audacious-plugins-3.8.2-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
splatcollision 9y ago
I recently installed Audacity on a new machine and was pleasantly surprised to not have to poke around and drop the LAME libs manually for it to work with MP3.

ytch 9y ago

AAC was released in 1997, why they start to advocate AAC after MP3's patent is expired? I thought they state "MP3 is dead" just because its patent is expired, while AAC isn't: http://www.via-corp.com/us/en/licensing/aac/licensefees.html http://www.via-corp.com/us/en/licensing/aac/licensefees.html

mavhc 9y ago

MP3 isn't dead, just journalism

rplst8 9y ago
This is the truest statement in the whole thread.
- charlesism 9y ago
  Yep. To take "MP3 encoding is now free for anyone to use!" and turn it into "MP3 is dead!" is one of the worst cases of bad reporting this year.
batushka 9y ago
The facts are true, the news is fake.

alsadi 9y ago

I wrote a similar article in Arabic. yes, because MP3 is now similar to public domain it does not mean it's dead. only the business of patent trolls behind it is dead. http://g0alkeeper.blogspot.com/2017/05/mp3.html http://g0alkeeper.blogspot.com/2017/05/mp3.html

kuschku 9y ago
It's not really a business of patent trolls. It's the unfortunate effect that the German research organisation that developed it only finances all their research with patents.
stannol 9y ago
The Fraunhofer Society is not and never was a "patent troll". They do actual research and one of their income sources is licensing the resulting patents.
- nailer 9y ago
  Fraunhofer put the source online without a license at the ISO site, let the community convince itself that MP3 was a standard and therefore unpatented, let the community write all the encoders and decoders and surrounding tools for years, then turned around and asked everyone who made their file format popular for 10K USD.
  - alsadi 9y ago
    Troll is a gentle word, the author of ffmpeg describe patents of software as "gangsters asking for protection money". All software patents are bad see my reply above http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070927224154/ffmpeg.mplayerhq.h...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
germanier 9y ago
There are many examples of patent trolls but this isn't one. MP3 was new, innovative, and the result of long effort. The patent fees directly funded new research of even better technology. That's the patent system working as designed. I just read your blog post through Google Translate. You seem to claim that they patented the use of Fourier transform for storage of music. This is not what happened at all. The patent was granted for specifying which part of the Fourier transform can safely be discarded for storage (and reconstructed while playback) without harming the sound you hear too much. That's not something they just looked up in a 200-year-old book but took more than a decade of complex research. The result of this research is their actual product and it's a highly valuable one.

lloeki 9y ago

> AAC and other newer audio codecs can produce better quality than MP3, but the difference is only significant at low bitrates. At about 128 kbps or greater, the differences between MP3 and other codecs are very unlikely to be noticed, so it isn’t meaningfully better for personal music collections. This is patently false unless you listen on bad audio gear (bad DAC, bad cans). I don't even have serious equipment (MBP+iPhone so guess about the DAC, as for headphones: AKG k514 mkII, Sennheiser Momentum (over ear), SoundMagic E10 (intra), Marshall Monitor (not mine), BeyerDynamic DT 770 250Ω (not mine)) and the difference is downright obvious going from 128k to 256k almost whatever the place and definitely noticeable on select features from 256k to 320k. Some corner-case audio patterns are just known to make MP3 encoders choke whatever the bitrate (a higher bitrate merely mitigates the problem for MP3), while they pass with flying colours on AAC. Sadly those corner cases are not just theoretical and have a real effect for some songs. At 320k though it won't make the song any less enjoyable (which is another metric entirely) but it can definitely be noticed (which is what the article claims).

untangle 9y ago
The author claimed that codec choice matters little >128k, not that 128k is of equal SQ to 256k. BTW, if you can easily discern 256k from 320k, I'd venture to guess that you are a 1% "golden ear" listener. OTOH, even my 60yo ears can tell 128k from 256k.
- lloeki 9y ago
  I understood that but didn't made it point clear: my point is that it matters in a bit more nuanced way. I'll use [0] as some sort of visual support to help transcribe how I perceive it: - 128k MP3 is like watching a Q=10 JPEG (artefacts and blockiness all over the place) while 128k AAC is much more like Q=50 (artefacting is much much more local, like the little grass patch on the left side of the stone) - 256k MP3 is generally great but still has artefacts happen occasionally in some local, specific areas, similar to Q=50 (but not in the same way as 128k AAC), and definitely not on all songs, while 256k AAC is very close to perfect in any situation. - 320k MP3 is very close to perfect save from very specific (and rare!) pathological corner cases that throws encoders off (like you have to have some specific bass line and some footwork on the bass drum and some very specific cymbal then the cymbal gets subtly crashy and noisy while the bass work gets subtly glitchy and muddled), which doesn't happen with AAC. Yes I've double blind-tested this with a friend who did not believe me, and used multiple MP3 encoders for that. So to sum things up: MP3 AAC 128k annoying enjoyable 256k excellent awesome 320k superb Those being ordered this way: annoying < enjoyable < excellent < superb < awesome It's not much that I have some "golden ear" that I've been trained into looking for some patterns when I was studying DSP and now that I know what to look for they just annoyingly pop out. It's a bit like watching logs fly by just fast enough that you can't read them yet spot some oddity and just go "wait, there was something right there", and should you scroll back, sure enough, here's the deal standing out like a sore thumb. Taking a bet that audio equipment gets better and cheaper with time I'd rather have a reasonable quality as a source, especially in light to the storage space and general bandwidth we have at our disposal. Then again in an increasingly streaming world we don't get much in the way of a choice whether it's about formats themselves or encoders. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Sample_photographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Sample_photographs

intoverflow2 9y ago

Honestly I'm looking forward to Spotify running out of money and shutting down so this generation will wake up that they need to start duplicating and archiving their media before they lose it. Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers. (I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche that it was 5-10 years ago)

thirdsun 9y ago
Thank you - my thoughts exactly. As an avid music collector and listener I understand that my interest in this issue probably isn't comparable to most other people, but I think there's no doubt that licensing deals will change/end and music starts to disappear from streaming services. There are already and always have been large gaps in the streaming catalogs but those are mostly releases that have never been there in the first place. I guess it will be different when John Doe sees his Spotify library shrinking and realizes that he was just renting all this music.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Can I plug something to you guys? I'm the same as you, I like collecting and listening to music, and I was tired at how fragile playlists are. If you move some files or rename them, they break. So, I wrote a spec for a new format, which is resilient to pretty much all operations: http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/ http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/ I'm currently writing a plugin for beets, but if anyone wants to help out with implementing an import/export plugin for a music player with library functionality, I would love that. I'm basically trying to scratch my own itch here, and hopefully one that many other people have.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    You're right. Migrating playlist from one platform, or just a player, to another is huge problem. Keeping them in sync seems impossible. A universal cross-platform playlist format seems like a much needed feature, but I don't se ehow this could work without significant changes in every supported player/software. Here's a very real playlist issue I'm facing right now: I use Roon as my main audio player / music management solution. Roon manages my library which is located on a NAS. I have a few playlists created there, but no way to sync them to my iPhone unless I manage a separate playlist in iTunes which has access to the very same NAS library. It's not a deal breaker since I'm used to playlists being software-specific. Unfortunately I don't see that changing anytime since everyone's answer to this problem seems to be using one single streaming service - a solution which, frankly, handles this particular problem very well, but doesn't work for me due to disadvantages of streaming discussed earlier in this thread.

hannob 9y ago

Not sure how the author comes to the conclusion that opus isn't widely supported. Opus is supported in all major webbrowsers and natively in modern Android systems. I'd call that widely supported.

libeclipse 9y ago
I guess it's relative. Compared to MP3, a lot of stuff could be considered "not widely supported".
Yaggo 9y ago
> Opus is supported in all major webbrowsers and natively in modern Android systems. I'd call that widely supported. http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus Not supported in Safari. I guess the reason is that iOS devices don't have hardware encoder for it and Apple doesn't want to compromise battery life (maybe marginal issue with audio, but big issue with webm).
- jhasse 9y ago
  > I guess the reason is that iOS devices don't have hardware encoder for it and Apple doesn't want to compromise battery life (maybe marginal issue with audio, but big issue with webm). I rather think that Apple doesn't like the idea of royalty-free codecs which would make it easier for free operation systems to support multimedia on the web. AAC helps to keep you locked into macOS or Windows, because it works out-of-the-box there (in contrast to Linux distributions like Fedora).
  - brainfire 9y ago
    On the other hand, the only audio format I'm aware of Apple inventing in the last 20 years is royalty-free and available under the Apache license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless
    - jhasse 9y ago

S_A_P 9y ago

As a former cakewalk software user it used to piss me off royally that I had to pay for the MP3 license to unlock the feature. It was a trivial amount (19bucks?) and I understand why they thought it was a good idea(their way of sticking it to Fraunhofer, and a ridiculous fee) but it ended up feeling like the customer that just spent 500 bucks on software was the one getting screwed especially considering how much cross licensing cakewalk did/does.

theandrewbailey 9y ago

I think the contrary, I can see MP3 getting even more popular now that it has no patents.

lholden 9y ago

MP3 has been "dead" to me ever since the non patent encumbered formats started becoming popular. Mind you, I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since the mid 90s... So I have a vested interest in open formats. These days, all my music is in a lossless format anyway. Especially now that my phone has enough storage space for it. Anyhow. I'd say that if anything... The patents expiring way the heck sooner would have been healthy for the format.

sitkack 9y ago

You know what needs to be resurrected? MPEG1 Video Codec. It scales to 4k x 4k and very soon to be patent free.

sitkack 9y ago
https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg
toyg 9y ago
There is a bunch of early-internet tech that will soon get out of patent locks, it could lead to a new Golden Age.

sevensor 9y ago

MP3 is now as dead as the GIF. Why, I haven't seen a GIF for at least... 15 seconds. At any rate, (pun intended), I'm perfectly happy with my vorbis files and not in any hurry to convert to MP3. But I'm glad I don't have to worry about the silly patent any longer.

kozak 9y ago

A big argument for using lossless instead of lossy are Bluetooth headphones. When you're listening through them, you're essentially re-encoding one lossy format into another lossy format, which degrades the quality much more than each of the formats does by itself.

mark-r 9y ago
I simply refuse to use Bluetooth headphones. Problem solved.

smaili 9y ago

Long live the MIDI!

zecg 9y ago

Finally, LAME can become LIME.

kazinator 9y ago

> AAC makes a lot of sense for low- and medium-quality applications where bandwidth is extremely limited or expensive, like phone calls and music-streaming services, or as sound for video, for which it’s the most widely supported format. Nope; you can scratch "phone calls" from that list. AAC (specifically, the AAC-LD variant) is not the best for low bitrate calls; you want a dedicated voice codec for that application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC-LD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC-LD AAC-LD is only geared toward voice in one parameter: frame size. It's basically just a "look, AAC can do this too if you want" feature. Look at the remark there: "It can use a bit rate of 32 - 64kbit/s or higher". That's a whopping lot. 32 kbps is about the far-out upper bound on bit rate for using a voice codec. You can get very good call quality at half that. http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ Basically if you look at all the options for compressing speech in telephony, AAC doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

phkahler 9y ago
I thought Opus was technically fine for phone and able to compete on quality. IIRC it only suffers from lack of use. On paper it seems to be the universal codec for audio.
- mentalpiracy 9y ago
  Opus is the default voice codec for Discord, and also available as a codec option for Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers. Anecdotally, the sound quality is above and beyond what I get on my cell, without question.
  - thescriptkiddie 9y ago
    Don't forget Mumble! Also Slack, apparently.
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
Its going to be hard to beat G.729's 6-8kbps bitrate. I can barely hear the difference between G.729 and G.711 on our voip system.

Markoff 9y ago

TIL MP3 is only one year younger than JPEG, or considering i was using JPEG daily years before MP3 took off, I remember Winamp version 1

isk517 9y ago

So many people here do not want to face the reality that MP3 is dead. I know, my dad who worked in the MP3 factory for 20 years was laid off last week just after the last MP3 came off the assembly line. I suspect the more entrepreneurial amongst you here may want to start scouring peoples Recycling Bins for old MP3s that you can break down into replacement parts to sell to collectors.

cowardlydragon 9y ago
I'm wondering if this is just reporting incompetence, or a symptom of the appalling degree of corporate influence on all modern for-profit reporting organizations. As usual I'll side with the conspiratorial. Similar to oligarchical government: an issue only has a chance if it has a corporation behind it, and a looming infringement of freedom is only stopped if a set of corporations oppose it.
phoenixProgram 9y ago
good riddance. they sound terrible. maybe we can go back to trading cassette tapes by carrier pigeon
globuous 9y ago
By mp3, do you mean .mp3, the audio file format, or an mp3 player ? Because the way I understand it, the article talks about the file format, not the hardware.
- news_to_me 9y ago
  I think it's a joke
- joehart42 9y ago
  Whoosh
toyg 9y ago
Netcraft confirms it, MP3 is dead.

Millennium 9y ago

I'm looking at the Tunequest list at http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/ http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/, and it looks to me like patents #5,924,060 and #5,703,999 (the last two listed) shouldn't expire for a few months yet. Is that list mistaken?

shmerl 9y ago

Well, it's not not patent incumbered, but there is no need to use it for anything besides playback of existing legacy media that doesn't have a lossless original. Otherwise just use Opus for playback purposes.

LeoNatan25 9y ago

Disagree with the author on the technical merits that AAC only sounds marginally better than MP3 at 128kbps and higher. For certain audio shapes, MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some extent JPEG for some image shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results due to different compression mechanics. Much like MPEG4 ASP and MPEG4 AVC and HEVC produce different compression artifacts, with ASP having much worse artifacts.

pizza234 9y ago
> For certain audio shapes, MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some extent JPEG for some image shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results due to different compression mechanics. Do you base this assertion on blind testing? I'd really like to know how much of the people that says "MP3 sounds X/Y/Z" actually did one (actually, I'd like all of them to actually do one), because in the blind tests I've participated/seen participating, with a modern encoder and mid/high bitrate (in the average range of 192/224 kbits) users were systematically not able to hear any difference. Of course I found some exceptions; for example, a friend of mine had good hearing on high frequencies, therefore, he could immediately spot 128 kbps CBR mp3s which have a lowpass threshold at ~16 khz.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  I think I fall within that latter category. I have done tests myself, in an environment I feel relaxed in and comfortable, and have been able to hear the difference. I also hear the difference going a step above, with lossless.

jjawssd 9y ago

Can the Opus codec be emulated with asmjs in Safari or iOS?

derf_ 9y ago
You may be interested in the following project from the Wikimedia Foundation: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/ https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

tibu 9y ago

http://mp3.isdead.fyi/ http://mp3.isdead.fyi/

Nano2rad 9y ago

Frauhofer announcement did not mention expiry of patents.

darklajid 9y ago

Tangentially related: Being out of touch with the podcast scene for quite a while I was interested to follow the 'Overcast' link. Unfortunately that turned out to be for platforms I don't own. If there are some passionate podcast listeners here, 1) do you have recommendations for an alternative to Overcast (ideally cross-platform, Android/Linux required, Windows desirable)? 2) can you recommend HN related (overlapping with the content here) podcasts?

QuicksilverJohn 9y ago
1) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod

ksec 9y ago

AAC was introduced in 1997, does any one know when will its patents expire as well? And we haven't had any improvement in Audio compression since then. MP3 - AAC and That is it. All the others are at best AAC similar quality / bitrate. At 256Kbps, the majority couldn't hear a difference between MP3 and AAC. At 128Kbps it is only slightly better. We dont have anything like HEVC which is an order of magnitude better then, say MPEG-2 at low bitrate.