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What about other audio formats? (FLAC/OGG/M4A/etc)


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If there's any consensus to utilize here, it's our consensus that for the casual listener, mp3 is ideal for both its relatively-small filesize compared to lossless formats such as FLAC and for the sheer amount of compatibility it has with pretty much everything.

Just sayin'.

Sooo...

basically, just about everything uses mp3 so why bother?

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It's debatable how far solid state drives will advance in 5 years, though my speculation is there will be some pretty substantial improvements.

That said, I don't mind being forward thinking and asking for WAVs or FLACs when available, but we're still going to keep MP3 as the primary format for the forseeable future. It's the 1 universally accepted standard for compressed audio.

I have WAVs of only 294 mixes out of 2246 so far (mostly album project mixes). There will always be big gaps as far as what's available for lossless files, when the day comes where sharing lossless files en masse is feasible without killing our bandwidth, but MP3 is still the universal standard.

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opinionated article written by one guy riddled with contradictions

Which parts?

It's debatable how far solid state drives will advance in 5 years, though my speculation is there will be some pretty substantial improvements.

That said, I don't mind being forward thinking and asking for WAVs or FLACs when available, but we're still going to keep MP3 as the primary format for the forseeable future. It's the 1 universally accepted standard for compressed audio.

I have WAVs of only 294 mixes out of 2246 so far (mostly album project mixes). There will always be big gaps as far as what's available for lossless files, when the day comes where sharing lossless files en masse is feasible without killing our bandwidth, but MP3 is still the universal standard.

I think the issue with file size downloading is more about bandwidth than space. And the major problem I see with forming a collection with mp3 (if you don't deny its flaws) is that once it's 'published', and if the creator disappears from the scene, that's it, flaws and all. A lot of the older files you see here are 128 kbps and have pretty terrible artifacts if they are a certain type of music. Why continue the trend with newer files when options are available? I understand the thinking of "just because it is" reason, but don't agree with it. Well, at least the albums are flac.

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Which parts?

(Before anyone jumps on me, I’ve heard even a 256 kbps mp3s sounding like this – I’ve just used a low quality version to make the point.)

Right so it's perfectly fine to HIDE potential counter examples and using extreme cases (128kbps) to support his point.

Sometimes. This depends so heavily on the material, the encoder and the codec – you simply can’t make blanket assumptions.

Right, so if you simply can't make blanket assumptions then why are you writing an entire article based on blanket assumptions?

Also, the introduction of the article is like a childish 6th grader trying to write a persuasive essay, hasn't even learned to keep "I" out of articles that are meant to inform. When you start your writing with "I hate mp3" it kinda shows how overblown and opinionated the rest of the article is going to be.

He used nothing but convenient evidence (openly admitting that he's not including other evidence but has "disproved" it himself). Ex: " I’ve heard even a 256 kbps mp3s sounding like this " (link plz? how about you let the readers judge?)

Also

Because people keep saying mp3 sounds great, or “indistinguishable from CD” and it’s just not true.

Uh-huh. Well you see, throughout the entire article he provided no proof for the bolded statement there. Why? He conveniently avoided citing any 320 kbps mp3 files. Oh sure, he said they don't sound good. I should just take his word for it then, huh? :banghead:

This is what happens when you have a weak argument with only extreme cases as evidence to support your "blanket assumption". You have to try and avoid talking about things that are counter examples. When you do that, it just shows how weak your argument really is. Especially if you actually do talk about counter examples but dismiss them without directly citing them. Making a point isn't as simple as giving out the tid bits of examples that agree with you. Again: " I’ve heard even a 256 kbps mp3s sounding like this "

No, I'm not trying to be that guy. I'm just answering your question.

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A teacher of mine who died young a few years back due to a brain tumor (reeallly young - about 26 I'd say) used to say:

Life Sucks Then You Die

... That's it.

Life sucks. You die.

enjoy the mp3s while they are here. I still don't understand why you are advocating us to STOP using mp3s.

Also, Neblix, you do a very good "that guy" impersonation. :-D

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Because you get file sizes that are substantially smaller for almost no tradeoff in quality (only audiophiles can hear the difference).

Also, lol at counting opinionated article written by one guy riddled with contradictions as consensus.

I agree.

320Kbs Mp3 is much smaller in size than say a FLAC file.

320kbs MP3's aren't even really that large. Size should only be a problem if you are using a cheap low storage MP3 player or are using MP3 players from years ago that only have small amount of storage.

Next to VBR (and OGG)320Kbs MP3's is the best way to go imho for audio quality/Storage tradeoffs. Sure it's a known fact that down at the basic level 320Kbs is not lossless and there IS information loss. But, audible? I don't hear it.

But If you can tell me now, that you can hear an significant audible difference between this.

A Lossless .Wav of one of my songs recorded @24-bit downsampled to 16-bit for the .Wav

http://kiwi6.com/file/3r60o4j5rq

And this

320Kbs MP3

http://kiwi6.com/file/g67g2jk657

Then you are full of shit

Free audio format... why the fuck bother for a "free" audio format... ?

Mp3 is free to me. VBR powa

I think the OP's intent was merely as he said "This, in order to support the campaign and to have a free and high quality audio format in which we can rely on, with no patent issues or particular owners."

With MP3 when you use it commercially you have to pay licensing fees depending on several factors.

THIS, is why you RIP the Music/audio from MANY modern PC games. You will find .OGG format music files.

Still, there really isn't much point for a place like OCR to use .OGG anyways because OCR is not selling music commercially. Or anything remotely like it.

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The licensing fees with MP3 only come into play for commercial applications, not individual artists distributing their stuff. In theory, anything that does MP3 decoding and encoding requires a license fee. Also, I thought iTunes didn't use MP3, but it's own format (AAC) to avoid this (and other) issue(s).

itunes will encode to aac by default but it can play mp3, at least last time I tried. It's a terrible program.

I'd just like to say one more thing. You could insist people use lame and encode with the tags -h (higher quality) and insist on -V 1 (I say this because I see you are now accepting VBR 1)

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  • 2 weeks later...
Why not use -q 0 instead of -h? Anyway, the lame manual states -h is always enabled when using VBR.

The lame manual says -q 0 is just slower but not usually better, but no harm in anyone setting that.

Oh and besides CBR and VBR there is also ABR. MP3 really is a mess but research led me to believe successful resistance to improvement is $ and not much else (mp3 equipment shills, etc). There is no point in going against that with technical improvement. http://jthz.com/mp3/ That is an old page, but to this day VBR is barely used compared to CBR. I also remember the crazy talk against Joint Stereo.

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