Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?

Funnily enough the guy who invented MP3 earned enough from royalties to barely afford a regular house in Germany. Meanwhile Apple made billions and rose like a phoenix from the ashes thanks to Apple Music and the iPod that rely on this format.

It's useful because it's ubiquitous. Everything that can take in music files supports it.

Is MP3-encoded audio of the best possible quality? No, of course not. But for most people it's Good Enough, especially if you do most of your listening in a noisy environment. MP3s are to lossless formats what CD was to vinyl for so many years.

I still prefer mp3 because it's small and doesn't sound any different to me than uncompressed formats, so why waste the disk space? 🤷🏻‍♂️

I am very slightly annoyed that people haven't moved onto Opus which gives you better compression and quality than MP3. MP3s are still useful for any older devices that have hardware decoding like radio sets, handheld players, etc. Otherwise, every modern device should support Opus out of box.

Hilariously, x264 has the same problem where there are direct upgrades with H.265 and AV1, but the usage is still low due to lack of hardware accelerated encoding (especially AV1), but like everyone uses FLAC for the audio which is lossless lol.

Podcasts are almost exclusively mp3. There is no need for lossless fidelity on those. And when you are subscribed to 200 podcasts like I am a small file size matters. And when listening at 2.5x speed lossless is a complete waste.

Sounds fine at good bitrates, universally supported, small, efficient, everywhere.

Yeah, MP3 is just fine. Found zero reason to use any other format. And of course, while the rest of the world streams everything I'll be happily using my massive MP3 library I can fit on a tiny little storage device and take everywhere I go without the need for the interbutts and big brother keeping tabs of what I listen to.

Apart from my home hifi (which is built around flac) everything i liaten to ia mp3. Podcasts - mp3. Car audio system? Max 192kbps mp3. My phone? Full of mp3. And I'm sure I'm not alone. To say mp3 is not relevant anymore is just misguided.

Opus is better than MP3 in every way. File size is either better or the same, and audio is better even at lower bitrates. But realistically, most streaming services don't provide HD audio, so it really doesn't even matter.

249 webm  audio only      2 │    1.58MiB  49k https │ audio only         opus        49k 48k low, webm_dash
250 webm  audio only      2 │    2.09MiB  65k https │ audio only         opus        65k 48k low, webm_dash
251 webm  audio only      2 │    4.14MiB 128k https │ audio only         opus       128k 48k medium, webm_dash
233 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
234 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
140 m4a   audio only      2 │    4.20MiB 130k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.2  130k 44k medium, m4a_dash

This is YouTube music, which generally serves the split audio from a YouTube video as a song. Most of them I checked either don't have audio above 130Kbps or don't even provide MP3/Opus anyways.

I got back into using soulseek and have mp3s on my phone and on my pc. I find it rewarding for privacy and offline reliability purposes. Not to mention it’s free.

Well, most of my music collection lies as mp3. I care about metadata and all of them have tags. I would love to convert my collection to opus but first I need FLACs and an easy way to move over metadata, since vorbis is different than ID3tag. Do you know a streamlined way for this?

I 100% do. I think mp3 is a good compromise of sound and space. It's also the format I'm used to. Just like how people swear by physical record. If I'm at a get together and hear mp3 quality, I'm at home.

That being said, I have my absolute favorites in flac for my iPod 5th gen video I rebuilt. The 5th gen's dac, Wolfson, is a solid little dac for the day and age. Got Rockbox loaded up and I'm ace, but I've hard saved all the Apple firmware for every model in case the time came to sell them. Old iPods could be an investment someday and I own every gen in multiples.

Sure, it's like JPG.

It may not be the newest or best compression ratio, but it works, and even the shittiest old hardware supports it. And I know it won't whine about licences being missing or some shit.

My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.

I remember reading articles at the time of the last patents running out. Some were so misguided it was hilarious.

They called it the death of MP3! As if patents were good or necessary, instead of restrictive and troublesome for interoperability.

… I’m out of the loop. Why don’t people care about mp3s?

I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there's no reason not to support the format.

MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I've been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven't ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)

About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn't grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and......get this......forked it! gasp!

Still to this day, I don't see how Winamp didn't see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn't even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!

Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.

Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let's take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID "HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???"

So that doesn't seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.

Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don't know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what's the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don't have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I'm not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.

So, if it wasn't them being blundering idiots, and it wasn't them deliberately doing this.......what the fuck DID happen?

My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.

Ogg at lower bitrates sounded better than mp3 at the same rate. Consumers dont care, but for a lot of game developers the zero patent risk and higher quality shipping with smaller files made Ogg a great choice at the time.

For me? FLACs are the only way.... which reminds me, I wonder I can still convert all the SHN (shorten) lossless files I still have. I should get on that before a converter doesn't exist.

Since it appears this happened 8 years ago, and uh, I can't say that I've seen a single MP3 file since then, perhaps nobody still cares.

If you're building a music library, and you're NOT using some sort of lossless format, I'd love to know why. I know a lot of people with massive libraries, medium libraries, and just shit they like one song at a time and not a one of them isn't using FLAC files for it.

They might transcode into something occasionally, but it's always something like AAC or OPUS, not MP3.

There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something "good enough" that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.

Mp3 has been dead to me for nearly a decade. Flac is superior in every way.

I care, because I’ve been using streaming media for quite a few years years and not kept up with any changes

Most people are archiving in FLAC but the reality is that almost nobody can hear the difference between 320 (or even V0) and FLAC. So in cases where the disk space makes a difference mp3 still makes sense.

I use m4a format simply because my downloader uses that format. But I think m4a sound quality is better than mp3.

yt-dlp uses m4a but sometimes I like my library to be mo3 just for nostalgia :(

I haven’t looked into this so deeply in a while. Thanks for the post! I use VLC, precisely because it plays most anything I throw at it. Cell coverage is spotty, so it’s common to play from files rather than stream. We have a bike ride, doubtless like many cities, social ride meets on the regular. Since Bluetooth, and everyone has a speaker. When I’m riding solo it lets people know I’m coming. Safer that way. I’ve heard people complain they don’t care to hear that cyclists taste in music, which tells me you heard them and weren’t harmed. You’ll hear that music, for a moment, and safely continue on your way. On the group ride everyone plays their own music, call it The Cacophony, if you will. Sometimes the music to the left, to the right match up in interesting ways.