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All the +2k podcasts hosted on Podigee (a podcast hosting company mainly known in German-speaking countries) are distributed in opus. But it is, and probably wi

All the +2k podcasts hosted on Podigee (a podcast hosting company mainly known in German-speaking countries) are distributed in opus. But it is, and probably will always be, a rather niche distribution format. AAC had its moment, but MP3 is alive and kicking. Even Apple acknowledges its importance by adding support for chapter markers in iOS12.

zdw 8y ago
There are a lot of playback issues - VBR MP3 and older OS releases of both iOS and Android, never mind the car players and similar all contribute to the problem. The post-show of this podcast talks about these and other issues in detail - Marco is on both sides of the issue as a podcast producer and podcast app developer: http://atp.fm/episodes/182 http://atp.fm/episodes/182
- CharlesW 8y ago
  If you're a podcaster, another benefit of AAC over MP3 is that VBR is not an issue.
CharlesW 8y ago
> AAC had its moment… That moment is 15 years in with no signs of losing steam[1]. AAC effectively replaced MP3 for most online audio use cases, with podcasting as a notable exception[2]. And of course, AAC is the audio format for all basically all online video distribution. [1] Apple kicked off the transition in 2003 with the introduction of AAC-based digital music sales. [2] Because podcasting is a decentralized medium, and the vast majority of podcasters don't know much (if anything) about media encoding.
- chungy 8y ago
  Perceptions are probably influenced heavily by your own usage and places for consumption. I'm also in the camp of "AAC is very rare, if at all"... Considering also that YouTube uses WebM, which very explicitly is only Vorbis or Opus for audio, "basically all online video distribution" must exclude the web's most popular video distribution site...
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    Every YouTube video has had AAC audio from the very beginning. Same goes for every Vimeo video, every Netflix video, every Hulu video, etc. Streaming audio services like Pandora use AAC too. That's because AAC is the only format you can count on to work on all devices, and to be hardware decoded on all devices where battery life matters.

zdw 8y ago

There are a lot of playback issues - VBR MP3 and older OS releases of both iOS and Android, never mind the car players and similar all contribute to the problem. The post-show of this podcast talks about these and other issues in detail - Marco is on both sides of the issue as a podcast producer and podcast app developer: http://atp.fm/episodes/182 http://atp.fm/episodes/182

CharlesW 8y ago
If you're a podcaster, another benefit of AAC over MP3 is that VBR is not an issue.

CharlesW 8y ago

> AAC had its moment… That moment is 15 years in with no signs of losing steam[1]. AAC effectively replaced MP3 for most online audio use cases, with podcasting as a notable exception[2]. And of course, AAC is the audio format for all basically all online video distribution. [1] Apple kicked off the transition in 2003 with the introduction of AAC-based digital music sales. [2] Because podcasting is a decentralized medium, and the vast majority of podcasters don't know much (if anything) about media encoding.

chungy 8y ago
Perceptions are probably influenced heavily by your own usage and places for consumption. I'm also in the camp of "AAC is very rare, if at all"... Considering also that YouTube uses WebM, which very explicitly is only Vorbis or Opus for audio, "basically all online video distribution" must exclude the web's most popular video distribution site...
- CharlesW 8y ago
  Every YouTube video has had AAC audio from the very beginning. Same goes for every Vimeo video, every Netflix video, every Hulu video, etc. Streaming audio services like Pandora use AAC too. That's because AAC is the only format you can count on to work on all devices, and to be hardware decoded on all devices where battery life matters.