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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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What’s wrong with mp3
Big file size for rather bad audio quality.
I've yet to meet someone who can genuinely pass the 320kbps vs. lossless blind-test on anything but very high-end equipment.
People are able to on some songs because mp3 is poorly optimized for certain sounds, especially cymbals. However, opus can achieve better quality than that at 128k with fewer outliers than mp3 at 320k, which saves a lot of space.
Oh, yeah, not arguing that Opus is the superior format. It 100% is. Not questioning that.
Indeed, the first place that gets hit by lower bitrates with MP3 is high frequencies. MP3 does have a pretty harsh cutoff at very high frequencies... that the vast majority of equipment can't reproduce and most ears can't hear. It's relatively debated, some claim to be able to "feel" the overtones or something like that. I'm extremely sceptical, if I'm being honest. Last time I did the test - must have been a decade ago - I couldn't distinguish lossless and high bitrate MP3 any more accurately than a coin toss.
We're not talking lossless. The comment above specified Opus-encoded OGG, which is lossy.
For example, I converted my music library from MP3 to OGG Opus and the size shrank from 16 GB to just 3 GB.
And if converting from lossless to both MP3 and OGG Opus, then OGG does sound quite a bit better at smaller file sizes.
So, the argument here is that musicians are underselling their art by primarily offering MP3 downloads. If the whole industry would just magically switch to OGG Opus, that would be quite an improvement for everyone involved.
Yeah, I'm aware. I probably wasn't clear. I think MP3 is just the default cause of immobilism. People still using "physical" medium/digital libraries rather than streaming are becoming a rare breed, and MP3 is just... good enough. Also familiarity - I remember googling "some song - some artist mp3" being the easy way to find single titles in my teenage years lol, if I wasn't aware of the new codecs, I'd probably default to MP3 without asking myself the question.
Well, I understood this post to mean, if you had a wish, what would you wish for? Not necessarily that it's realistic...
I do agree with your points. Although, I can't help but feel like more people would prefer local files, if those actually sounded better than the bandwidth-limited streaming services.
I was expanding on the subject, generating side discussion stuff. Maybe I came across as standoffish - if that's the case, I apologize.
I'm not sure how much people would care... Even back then, convincing people around me that their 128kbps MP3 sounded like it played on a tiny dollar store external speaker playing in a shower was almost impossible. Tons just download MP3s off of YouTube and call it a day. So many people don't seem to care, unfortunately.
Convenience is the best motivator, IMHO. Downloading MP3s and loading them on your MP3 player used to be easy. You had sites literally letting you download songs directly. Torrents were big. Hell, going back, eMule/Kazaa, even Limewire, all was much easier than buying CDs and ripping them, or even when buying from online stores became a thing, with the DRM early on, etc, downloading was much less hassle.
Now people pay one price and get to listen to all the music they want to listen to.
yeah, but guess what opus is transparent at? depending on the music, anywhere from 96kbps to 160kbps.
320 kbps is approaching lossless audio compression bitrates.
Opus does better in about half the space. And goes down to comically low bitrates. And his obscenely small latency. It's not simple, but hot dang, is it good.
The Quite Okay Imaging guy did a Quite Okay Audio follow-up, aiming for aggressive simplicity and sufficient performance, but it's fixed at a bitrate of 278 kbps for stereo. It's really competing with ADPCM for sound effects in video games.
Personally, I think an aggressively simple frequency-domain format could displace MP3 as a no-brainer music library format, circa 128 kbps. All you have to do is get forty samples out of sixty-four bits. Bad answers are easy and plentiful. The trick is, when each frame barely lasts a millisecond, bad answers might work anyway.
I think that people overstate MP3's losses, and I agree at 320k that it's inaudible, but I can or at least have been able to tell at 128k, mostly with cymbals. Granted, cymbals aren't that common, but it's nice to not have them sound muddy. And, honestly, there just isn't a lot of reason to use MP3 for anything compressed today, other than maybe hardware decoding on very small devices and widespread support. There are open standards that are better.
Oh, for sure. See my other comments. Opus is probably my favorite as well.