MPEG Audio Layer 3 has been lurking around the internet since 1995, and now with disk sizes increasing and the cost per Gb for Harddrives getting cheaper all the time, is it time that we ditched mp3's, or infact lossy audio and move to another format?

I can't say the internet hasnt tried: Over the past few years formats like AAC, MPC, OGG etc have came, some of their fanboy's hoping or thinking that their format was going to abolish the mp3 format off the internet. What I think they have done instead is "diversified" the audio format out there, and meant that software players have had to support, either by default or plugin, all these extra formats, whilst mp3 ripping groups remain close to using LAME on its ever popular --alt-preset-standard parameter (which is purely VBR between 192-256).

Now with lossless compression becoming better, and the cost per Gb for disk space getting cheaper everyday, HDD's getting large sizes and faster, why are we all still stuck with lossy audio in a format that is now a decade old? Why is it just audiophiles who move to FLACE, APE and ALE?

Discuss.

Here's something I've been wondering for some time, but been too lazy to find out: Most lossless audio formats encode the data for each frame by first making a rouch approximation of the waveform, and then compressing the difference between the approximation and the real data. What occurs to me is, why not use MP3 for the approximation instead of a much simpler model? I suppose it would be easy enough to find out if there's any point in doing this...

>>2

Thats what OGG is suppose to do. But the other main catch with no one leaving mp3 is that little mp3 players out there support anything else.

MP3 is a format everyone knows, and everyone supports.

It would be nice to think that OGG could slowly phase it out, but it won't happen soon.

OGG has some catching up to do with MP3 at high bitrates, at least when comparing stock Vorbis 1.1 vs Lame --alt-preset-standard. There's the aoTuV b3 modification, but I believe it still loses to --aps.

Then there's that dark horse, MPC. Held huge promise, but seems to have vanished into the cracks. Development has started up again, but at this point it seems to have permanently lost momentum.

The successor apparent for MP3 is probably AAC. The transition will probably take some time, and we'll never get rid of MP3 due to the massive archives of music in this DRM-unencumbered format. It's good enough, right?

Now if only we could convince everyone to use lame --aps or --ape and we'd all be set.

BTW, at low bitrates, I've been very impressed by AAC+. di.fm switched to AAC+ for 24kbps a short while ago, and MP3 just cannot compete at all at those bitrates.

Very impressive.

IMO, Vorbis aoTuV b3 is also useful for 24kbps at 22kHz or so.

i <3 OGG vorbis

even at 64k it can give a 128k mp3 a run for it's money quality-wise :D

i found 96k OGG to be the best size/quality tradeoff for use on my smartphone (256mb storage)

>>at 64k it cannot give a 128k mp3 a run for it's money quality-wise

fixed

ABX results plz

On second thought, it depends on your music collection. It's highly unlikely though, even with aoTuV goodness. 80 or 96kbps Vorbis roughly matching 128kbps MP3 is more likely.

>Now with lossless compression becoming better, and the cost per Gb for disk space getting cheaper everyday, HDD's getting large sizes and faster, why are we all still stuck with lossy audio in a format that is now a decade old?
> Why is it just audiophiles who move to FLACE, APE and ALE?

1. A lot of people haven't gotten significantly larger HDDs, and would rather stuff them with higher quality movies than higher quality songs. Their speakers aren't good enough to make way better files worth it, but the screens usually are more than good enough to justify upgrading to far better video files.
2. People are too used to mp3s, and know they work decently enough for them to be happy, and thus don't want to bother with checking out other file types their various items and programs might not be able to handle. Laziness = can't be arsed to try new things without enough motivation, nor downloading/buying and getting used to new players if their old, outdated player can't handle it.
3. Lusers who buy bigger hard-drives don't want to store the same or slightly larger amount of music files as/than what they used to (only in better quality). They want to store significantly more files in there - along with a fuckload more of everything else including movies and so on. Having a shitty hdd + shitty, 1.2MB mp3s and then moving to a good hdd won't make people replace their entire collection. They probably will upgrade some to slightly better files of twice or more the size, but out of habit they'll look for mp3s of higher quality, instead of going for better file formats.... i.e. Good enough for government work.
4. Downloading files shouldn't take too long. Even if a luser has a terabyte in HDD space, it won't do him much good if his download speed is only one Mb or less. There are too many places with shitty or otherwise unreliable download speeds, as well as places that have a monthly download/upload limit. A lot of lusers would rather get a 3MB mp3 than a larger file of another format because of that they'd get the mp3 file significantly quicker - which matters a lot if it's an entire collection of mp3s they're downloading, vs an entire collection of some other sound files.

What would really help it out would be if what is commonly known as "MP3 Players" started supporting ogg-vorbis. I was given an mp3 player a while ago and it was rediculously annoying how it can't play ogg files. A lot of my favorite albums on my computer (that I actually own), I ripped to ogg. Now I would have to re-rip them to mp3 just to put them on the player... which would take a lot of time and be pretty tedious.

>>13 many of them do, you just have to look for that when buying.