I guess the current aac patent holders are smiling now :)

Confuse & conquer!!!

If you look at the three links that Marco posted in the first sentence, they lead to articles by Gizmodo, Engadget and NPR, all of which completely got the story wrong. That's shocking, if you ask me.

It's not just Engadget and ilk. The difference between being end-of-life as a product for Fraunhofer, and obsolete as a format, is a distinction not many outlets have made.

It's an aggregator, and you need to resist the urge to click on the links. But the headlines and blurb are often informative enough that you usually don't need to click.

Why?

"Fraunhofer, the major contributor to MP3, shut down its licensing program in April as MP3 patents expired — Red Hat has announced that Fedora will include official MP3 decoding and encoding. The reason is that MP3 is now patent free - as far as anyone can tell."

First linked (Engadget) article: "MP3 is dead, long live AAC. Its creators have abandoned licenses to the format, signing its death sentence."

Not clicking would have both saved you time and left you better informed.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2015/02/09/nikon-d810a-astrophotogr...

A CTO without technical background is indeed in a very poor state

There's some unfortunate irony in that we just got out from under the MP3 patents, which mean that MP3 encoders can finally get mainlined and won't require screwing around like we're all gotten used to for a decade+ (having to add some extra repo to your apt.sources or equivalent file, etc.), but at the same time the consumption patterns of music have shifted again, away from portable devices with high-density storage like iPods, and towards streaming particularly over cell-data networks.

There is an argument, although I do not like some of its conclusions, that some of the newer codecs are preferable to MP3 if you are working within <96kb/s for a stereo signal so that you can put it over a 3G connection or something. MP3 starts to sound audibly bad at lower bitrates, depending on what you're listening to.

My cellphone today is a much more powerful device than my 2007 iPod, but doesn't have nearly the same amount of available onboard storage (and what storage it does have is split between music and photos and software and other stuff). So the tradeoffs that make for an ideal codec choice on the iPod aren't clearly great on the phone.

IMO, this is an argument for keeping your personal music collection in an uncompressed/losslessly-compressed format, so that you can recompress it easily based on how it's actually going to be used.

If you were sharing, FLAC was guaranteed high-quality and free. AAC/WMA usually meant copy-protected though likely a higher quality.

When I was a teenager my first MP3 player (RCA Lyra) came with one 32 MB CompactFlash card. I cut the bitrate down far enough to fit 4 or 5 full albums on that at once. It sounded like absolute garbage but I was the only kid who could fit that much music in my pocket.

I tell this story because I'm still impressed by what MP3s can do after so much time.

Do you only use software that'll run on Windows 2000?

Mainstream support for Windows 2000 ended twelve years ago.

> So where are these shitty players that can't play Oggs? I've never had one.

Apple is selling a music player called "iPod" right now. Perhaps you've heard of it. Updated in 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch_(6th_generation)

Guess what iPods don't support? OGG.

Guess what iPods do support? MP3.

BTW, "Ogg" isn't an acronym.

As for me, flac is better for storing sounds. Stored flac has no artifacts (if obtained without them), I can recode it to mp3, vorbis, opus or something else, and get artifacts from that codec, but not artifacts from mp3 plus artifacts from that codec.

And even assuming that it's audible at 192kbit/s with a decent encoder, why not just use 320kbit/s MP3 which are still significantly smaller than lossless?

16bit lossless audio is great for producers, you have a lot of headroom for messing with it, re-encoding it, twisting it, amplifying it, mixing it etc... But if you're just archiving public releases for "consumption" it's completely overkill.

>It's like interlacing in movies or bugs at borders of contrasting areas of picture in jpeg

In what way? Interlacing is completely irrelevant in the context of audio.

I'm sorry if I come off as adversarial but it's a pet peeve of mine. The maths and physics behind signal processing are very well understood, if some algorithm induces a signal degradation in the audible spectrum it should be trivial to show it objectively with the right measuring equipment and/or the right mathematical equation.

Splash cymbals in particular sound terrible (or noticeably degraded) on low bitrate stereo MP3s (ie 128kbit/s). Some early encoders actually did a lowpass filter to eliminate frequencies above 16kHz, to mask the 'watery' high-frequency warble (see [1]). Note how even the Fraunhofer codec differs a lot at high-frequencies in the charts on that link.

Some of it is still noticeable even in lower bitrate AAC. I've got U2's Pop album on CD from 1997 (coincidentally the first album to be leaked as MP3 [2]), and even at 128kbps iTunes AAC the cymbals just don't sound right on 'Gone'. They're watery, like an audio version of a badly compressed JPG. I keep meaning to re-rip it at higher bitrate.

[1] http://archive.arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/1q00/mp3/mp3-3.htm...

[2] http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/652-a-history-of-digital-album...

With good headphones (I'm talking 200+ euros class headphones for example) there is a certain difference between even a 320 kpbs MP3 vs a 128 AAC.

AAC or OGG for example just has better usualy clarity in the sound, the bass is clearer and more distinct and the hihats and other hi sounds aren't muffled in the background or don't lose their clarity like they do with MP3s.

And like the parent wrote, once you have heard those 'signature losses' of the mp3 codec, it's very hard not to notice them.

Still, when I get new stuff, or rip now, I try to do it at least at 192 or 320, since space isn't an issue any longer.

If I first heard the MP3 version, and then heard the FLAC... I might be able to point out which one was which afterwards, under very good conditions and depending on the recording. I remember doing this test several years back. The general details are pretty much the same, but the MP3 version kind of changes the "sound stage" a bit for a lack of a better term.

It's very subtle and in practice, you need critical-listening environments even to do this. 99% of music is not heard in critical listening music environments. A huge amount of music isn't even engineered for this kind of critical listening these days (eg: you need recordings that haven't destroyed the dynamic range in the first place, which rules out most radio pop today.)

I agree that having the ability to transcode to lossy with as little loss as possible is IMHO the best reason to store music in FLAC.

I would love to have lossless audio purely for storage purposes - however, it would be quite expensive for me to do so with the amount of music I have, as well as time consuming. For me at least, mp3 is the perfect balance, and its ubiquitous compatibility makes it a no brainer.

Although this is anecdotal, it pings off your own experiences: A friend of mine (and self-described audiophile) recently got into a discussion with a mutual friend regarding mp3, FLAC, and how both of them could tell the format apart simply by listening. I suggested that perhaps the mp3s he had available were simply poorly encoded, and sent him a sample of my library that's a direct rip from a CD (at a modest bitrate of either 192kbps or 256kbps, I can't remember). He then realized that the mp3s he had been comparing against his FLAC copies of the same album were likely YouTube rips from before he bought the album, and that he likely never downloaded the official mp3s when he purchased the FLAC sources. He confided that he had a difficult time determining which was which when comparing the two on more equal footing with the sample I sent.

I still posit that the average person can't tell the difference, even with above average hardware. Exceptionally sensitive hearing outside the normal range of most humans notwithstanding, a decently encoded mp3 (or Opus format for that matter) should hardly be distinguishable from a FLAC, if at all. I suspect that most of those who claim they can hear the difference aren't particularly special--they're just comparing poorly encoded files against a source format.

At any rate, I'm in my mid-thirties, and I know my hearing isn't quite as acute as it was a decade ago. FLACs are more of a novelty for the sake of original sources, because there's no way I could tell the difference between that and mp3s with a good bitrate. With the exception of the Hunt for Red October soundtrack, I've not been able to tell low/moderate (~128kbps) bitrate mp3s apart from high (384kbps) ones AFAIK (the high pitches in the hymn "warble" at lower bitrates--not sure I can detect this now, though).

The same thing could be happening with lossless. If you are going to the trouble of encoding and storing a lossless digital music collection, I think chances are good you're listening on very good equipment. And you might scoff at the idea of trying out high-bitrate MP3 on it, because the MP3s you have from your Napster days really do sound terrible through your tube amp.

OTOH I wouldn't go too far down the "can't hear it anyway" road. I'm in my 40's and there's plenty I can't hear, but I assume not everything in my collection will be on YouFacePotify for my grandkids to listen to while their ears still work.

My scheme is FLAC when I can, otherwise MP3. I can render the FLAC to MP3 (a batch script keeps things up to date) for compatibility/size with some things, but my main system plays FLAC just fine.

It isn't practical to take my full collection with me in MP3. Just checked, and the music share is currently 5.38T, but that's with a full set of MP3 dupes. And there is some garbage in there I haven't has the patience to weed out yet. I just point the phone at the MP3 directory and pick 'n choose with ITunes. If I really want some random song while not at home, I can pull it off my server easily enough, but at my age, I don't really develop strong needs for a particular song.

I can understand why Fraunhofer made this statement (it is still despicable) but it is really sad to see how gullible people are.

I haven't used it in years, but I'm pretty sure Bandcamp will only accept lossless codecs.

Huh? That seems totally wrong to me.

I wouldn't expect a codec to develop their own, unique, incompatible container format, and I would hope very much that they would not (!!), but it's a real mistake to develop a codec and not specify at least some sort of preferred container format.

Otherwise, people are going to do what is often done with FLAC: not put it into a container format and just treat the raw output from the codec as a distribution format. And then complain that the whole thing sucks because there's no support for multiple streams, metadata, lyrics, subtitles, album covers, cuesheets, whatever.

The way to avoid that is not to set users up for failure by releasing the bare codec without some sort of preferred container format that's used by default. If the FLAC encoder had always used OGG containers (or Matroska or Quicktime or AVI or whatever) by default there'd be a whole lot fewer bare FLAC files floating around, convincing everyone that "FLAC sucks because there's no metadata".

That said, there are some issues with container formats as they are frequently implemented, which tends to drive users towards not using them and just exchanging bare codec output: if you separate the user from the codec with an intermediate container layer, you can create a ton of frustration when users get files that they think they can use, based on the file extension, but then get an error because they don't have the codec du jour... but there was no obvious way to tell that when they were looking at the file. The codec used is far more important to the average user than the type of container format, most of the time. (And yeah the ideal solution would be for filesystems to stop sucking so badly at metadata; MacOS and HFS was better at this stuff in 1996 than most modern computers are today -- at least it had the idea of both a file "type" and its "creator" as distinct things from the extension.) But in our world, the result is some containers being perceived as "unreliable" or "fussy" because they're used for a diversity of codecs that not all implementations have.

I don't have a great solution to that second problem, but at the very least I think that the file extension should follow the codec combination used inside the file, and not the container format. E.g. an AVI container with AVC compressed video inside shouldn't have the same file extension as an AVI container with Sorenson Video inside it; those two things are not interchangeable as far as a user is concerned. Since file extensions are the only metadata users get, they need to somehow represent the combination of both codec+container.