[Fishy]

Well encoded high bit-rate mp3 sounds fine to most people on their average listening equipment for the majority of music. As a classical recording engineer I grant you that it can impact the subtleties of music once you know what to listen for but... well too bad. We just changed the max bit-rate on OCR into the minimum one so progress is being made. I'm sure OCR will periodically review when it is financially trivial to start hosting higher quality.

We do release lossless versions for the album releases because they are distributed by torrent and therefore the increased file size isn't a burden on the website's hosting cost and allows OCR to remain free :3.

[Liontamer]

MP3 is the de facto standard for audio files and is supported by every major player and app.

So any writeup about why OGG/AAC/M4A/etc is irrelevant to the average user who doesn't think twice about what format they're listening to and doesn't have ears of gold. People just wanna get the files quick and not think about the format.

Unless the de facto standard was in a clear shift towards something other than MP3 as THE most widely accepted format, our standards there wouldn't change.

[soulflay]

Originally Posted by Fishy

I grant you that it can impact the subtleties of music once you know what to listen for

Yes, as the link I put up shows it's not a hard thing to learn what to listen to. I can't go back to mp3 after that.

but... well too bad.

I guess.

Originally Posted by djpretzel

Hmmm, where to begin.

Let me just make an ideological point that bears making: open formats, and open technology, are both "good things". However, they are not the ONLY things, nor do they outweigh real-world considerations and practicality. Open format zealots usually have good intentions, but I hate to break it to you: the world is full of patents. Not all of them are bad, not all of them are evil, and some of them actually protect & inspire innovation, as opposed to curtailing it.

But let me take another step back, re: MP3 specifically: the cat's out of the bag, the ship has sailed, and the fat lady has pretty much sung. Not in terms of MP3 being superior from a technical perspective - that's a whole different can of worms - but in terms of it being a format so widely-employed and easily accessible that it is, for all intents and purpose, "open". Maybe not on paper - although it's my understanding that it IS essentially open in terms of playing/decoding, just not encoding - but in practice. Practice makes all the difference in the world, as any site that focuses on fan arrangements of commercial game soundtracks can tell you...

I know my post was moved here but I was never really advocating open source. My argument against mp3 is purely technical quality. AAC is in a similar boat as MP3 as far as patents, but still technically better than mp3. And any current portable that supports mp3 also supports aac. I don't think I ever held an mp3-only portable in my hands, although I'm sure they exist, just not so much anymore. Software players certainly support aac/m4a as commonly as mp3.

[zircon]

The adoption of AAC/M4A is definitely not nearly as widespread when you look at the full spectrum of players, plugins and hardware devices.

[SonicThHedgog]

isn't the patent for mp3 expiring in 5 years :O

I would love multi format releasing like for lossy and lossless formating, but in popularity and common ritural, thats not going to happen for a long time.

[Yami]

FLAC is a free format
But too bad it's so huge

[soulflay]

Originally Posted by zircon

The adoption of AAC/M4A is definitely not nearly as widespread when you look at the full spectrum of players, plugins and hardware devices.

But I'd be willing to bet that the amount of people relying on these mp3-only environments are even less than those using vorbis. If that is true it's an obscure environment to cater to, and things can be transcoded into mp3 as easily as to vorbis. I can't think of any examples first hand where aac audio support was absent.

[Bahamut]

Originally Posted by soulflay

Wouldn't it be better to make the files available as a better lossy files, such as vorbis or at least aac/m4a? There is a lot of consensus that mp3 causes sound quality to suffer and should be retired. http://productionadvice.co.uk/why-mp3-sounds-bad/

I wouldn't take such a flawed article as consensus.

Originally Posted by Article

mp3 is a temporary phenomenon, just like AM radio, cassettes and CDs.

I think this line gives a pretty good indication how stupid the article is, not to mention the flawed conclusion drawn from the argument, which can be paraphrased like this: "A 128 kbps mp3 of a live show sounds bad compared to the lossless version, so that makes mp3s of all compressions sound bad and that we shouldn't be listening to music in the mp3 format!"

Sorry, but that's a bad article, especially in light of all of the studies out there that shows that most people cannot distinguish between a 192 kbps mp3 and lossless, and it's dubious whether any human is capable of making that distinction.

[zircon]

Originally Posted by soulflay

But I'd be willing to bet that the amount of people relying on these mp3-only environments are even less than those using vorbis. If that is true it's an obscure environment to cater to, and things can be transcoded into mp3 as easily as to vorbis. I can't think of any examples first hand where aac audio support was absent.

For example, your average CD player or car system will typically support MP3 CDs, not AAC or M4A CDs.

[Neblix]

If you can hear the difference between 320kbps mp3 and lossless

YOU'VE GOT SOME SERIOUS KILLER STUDIO CHOPS.