5 ms·

Where "very usable" == "sounds exactly the same as lossless", unless there's some double blind study showing that people can reliably tell the difference betwee

Where "very usable" == "sounds exactly the same as lossless", unless there's some double blind study showing that people can reliably tell the difference between v0/320 mp3's and lossless... I've never seen one.

r00fus 9y ago
It's more about branding. In the early days, an mp3 could easily be some 64k cbr shite. If you were sharing, FLAC was guaranteed high-quality and free. AAC/WMA usually meant copy-protected though likely a higher quality.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  >In the early days, an mp3 could easily be some 64k cbr shite. When I was a teenager my first MP3 player (RCA Lyra) came with one 32 MB CompactFlash card. I cut the bitrate down far enough to fit 4 or 5 full albums on that at once. It sounded like absolute garbage but I was the only kid who could fit that much music in my pocket. I tell this story because I'm still impressed by what MP3s can do after so much time.
dombesz 9y ago
The bigger the system is, the noticeable the difference is. It's the same as displaying jpgs versus analog images on a large projector. The difference is much more noticeable with the audio! But yeah, this is a more of an analog versus digital debate, rather than comparing digital formats. However lossless is called lossless for a reason.
Kadin 9y ago
As a distribution format for mixed-down music that will be consumed from a portable device's internal storage, 320kb/s VBR is great. There's some unfortunate irony in that we just got out from under the MP3 patents, which mean that MP3 encoders can finally get mainlined and won't require screwing around like we're all gotten used to for a decade+ (having to add some extra repo to your apt.sources or equivalent file, etc.), but at the same time the consumption patterns of music have shifted again, away from portable devices with high-density storage like iPods, and towards streaming particularly over cell-data networks. There is an argument, although I do not like some of its conclusions, that some of the newer codecs are preferable to MP3 if you are working within <96kb/s for a stereo signal so that you can put it over a 3G connection or something. MP3 starts to sound audibly bad at lower bitrates, depending on what you're listening to. My cellphone today is a much more powerful device than my 2007 iPod, but doesn't have nearly the same amount of available onboard storage (and what storage it does have is split between music and photos and software and other stuff). So the tradeoffs that make for an ideal codec choice on the iPod aren't clearly great on the phone. IMO, this is an argument for keeping your personal music collection in an uncompressed/losslessly-compressed format, so that you can recompress it easily based on how it's actually going to be used.

r00fus 9y ago

It's more about branding. In the early days, an mp3 could easily be some 64k cbr shite. If you were sharing, FLAC was guaranteed high-quality and free. AAC/WMA usually meant copy-protected though likely a higher quality.

iamatworknow 9y ago
>In the early days, an mp3 could easily be some 64k cbr shite. When I was a teenager my first MP3 player (RCA Lyra) came with one 32 MB CompactFlash card. I cut the bitrate down far enough to fit 4 or 5 full albums on that at once. It sounded like absolute garbage but I was the only kid who could fit that much music in my pocket. I tell this story because I'm still impressed by what MP3s can do after so much time.

dombesz 9y ago

The bigger the system is, the noticeable the difference is. It's the same as displaying jpgs versus analog images on a large projector. The difference is much more noticeable with the audio! But yeah, this is a more of an analog versus digital debate, rather than comparing digital formats. However lossless is called lossless for a reason.

Kadin 9y ago

As a distribution format for mixed-down music that will be consumed from a portable device's internal storage, 320kb/s VBR is great. There's some unfortunate irony in that we just got out from under the MP3 patents, which mean that MP3 encoders can finally get mainlined and won't require screwing around like we're all gotten used to for a decade+ (having to add some extra repo to your apt.sources or equivalent file, etc.), but at the same time the consumption patterns of music have shifted again, away from portable devices with high-density storage like iPods, and towards streaming particularly over cell-data networks. There is an argument, although I do not like some of its conclusions, that some of the newer codecs are preferable to MP3 if you are working within <96kb/s for a stereo signal so that you can put it over a 3G connection or something. MP3 starts to sound audibly bad at lower bitrates, depending on what you're listening to. My cellphone today is a much more powerful device than my 2007 iPod, but doesn't have nearly the same amount of available onboard storage (and what storage it does have is split between music and photos and software and other stuff). So the tradeoffs that make for an ideal codec choice on the iPod aren't clearly great on the phone. IMO, this is an argument for keeping your personal music collection in an uncompressed/losslessly-compressed format, so that you can recompress it easily based on how it's actually going to be used.