I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC, then I was able to convert those to Ogg Vorbis at the time for my portable player. Later I converted the FLACs to mp3s, and used Apple's iTunes Match, so I have access to them on various devices for $25/year.

“Them”. I tried this when it launched, and so many of my unique recordings were clobbered: Artists incorrectly identified, live recordings replaced with studio recordings, etc. I threw the idea out and never looked back.

> There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder

Really? From tests I did way back in the day, the quality was comparable at around half the size. It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free. Let's hope Opus has a better fate.

>It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free.

Spotify currently uses Ogg Vorbis on desktop and mobile, and AAC for the web player.

MP3 is also royalty-free now and MP3 encoders are much better than they were 20 years ago.

Even on bog-standard Android, Ogg files tend not to be as well supported by random music programs compared to MP3. I re-ripped a few CDs in MP3 that I'd also foolishly done to ogg just have them play gapless in VLC I think it was (might have been some other app, I forget now), otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. And another app I use to slow down or pitch shift tracks to play along to or transcribe didn't work with anything but MP3 for a long time, though that at least got an update.

>otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them.

Oh christ, this is my least favorite thing about newer audio formats. Some of the old albums were meant to be heard in one stretch; there are no gaps between tracks, because you're hearing a story. Then comes mp3 and digital audio, with a second pause between them. It just kills me.

I get accused of being a hipster by my family. I just want to hear the story!

I stopped having this issue for well over a decade. Especially on some albums I enjoy there are tracks which are logically separate (on CD as well as files) yet "play" into one another continuously, so I'd have noticed this as it would produce a weird silence in an otherwise seamless musical transition.

It's entirely a player thing to start decoding the next track slightly before the current track ends and continuously feed the audio buffer with no gap. This has nothing to do with mp3 and digital audio, but everything with players that don't conceptually split between reading a file and pushing audio to the output but are just glorified shell for loops over mpg321.

No, it does. MP3 has an issue with gapless playback. A one second pause is a player thing, but the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, because it always stores an integer number of audio blocks, and adds padding at the beginning. This is why nobody should ever use MP3 for e.g. sending around clips for video or audio production - quality issues aside, it also screws up the timing and aligning the start of the track.

More modern formats solved this issue by precisely defining the start/end points so decoding can produce an output with precisely the same alignment and number of samples as the input.

There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support into it, but the core format cannot do it.

> the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, because it always stores an integer number of audio blocks, and adds padding at the beginning.

I agree, although arguably the MP3 "core format" has had a number of extensions around so many things that ultimately became de facto standards (vendor extensions if you will). I remember how you could not have precise seeking or current time display with VBR, which now seems to be now largely a solved problem.

> There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support

One of these is LAME adding gapless stuff at least as far back as 2003, so yes it's a workaround to a format limitation, but it's quite an old one, and fairly stable and known well enough that it's been a while since encoders default to encode with gapless metadata.

There's an interesting historical explanation here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2

I do agree though that the easy path out of it is to just stop using MP3, for this reason and a zillion others ;)

In my collection, this is most evident with Home by the Sea/Second Home by the Sea from Genesis.

I didn't really pick up on it until I decided to take my son through Thick as Brick and literally any album by Yes. They're just ruined by that small gap.

I remember when "gapless playback" was a big deal when it was eventually added to iPods.

Dull tools and people who don't care.

"Good enough" can be the enemy of "correct".