Not being encumbered by patents is a huge advantage for MP3s going forward, and the reality is that MP3 is good enough for vast majority of situations. The improvements newer formats like AAC bring are not worth the trouble of being chained to a proprietary format.
I was a flac snob when I was younger, and I can say with certainty: 320kbps mp3s or even VBR are indistinguishable from opus or even lossless except when listening very very very closely on high end hardware. I’m very into audio still and production etc. That’s not to say opus isn’t better or higher quality, but the difference it makes is decidedly negligible to the vast majority of listeners. I guarantee that almost everyone would fail to do better than a coin flip a/b testing these technologies on the same audio recording.
192kbps opus will allow you to achieve roughly the same quality as 320kbps mp3. If you stream your music from any device or have a larger collection this difference can matter a lot.
As a music producer, you notice 192k MP3. The next jumps you probably don’t notice. I’m still a flac snob because I have to work a lot with original quality files, but for the average users there’s probably not even a difference between MP3 192k+ and flac or wav or opus or whatever.
Not being encumbered by patents is a huge advantage for MP3s going forward, and the reality is that MP3 is good enough for vast majority of situations. The improvements newer formats like AAC bring are not worth the trouble of being chained to a proprietary format.
There’s always Opus.
Sure, but is there any practical benefit using Opus given that MP3 is much more widely implemented?
Much better quality for the same bitrate and it’s supported pretty much everywhere too.
I was a flac snob when I was younger, and I can say with certainty: 320kbps mp3s or even VBR are indistinguishable from opus or even lossless except when listening very very very closely on high end hardware. I’m very into audio still and production etc. That’s not to say opus isn’t better or higher quality, but the difference it makes is decidedly negligible to the vast majority of listeners. I guarantee that almost everyone would fail to do better than a coin flip a/b testing these technologies on the same audio recording.
192kbps opus will allow you to achieve roughly the same quality as 320kbps mp3. If you stream your music from any device or have a larger collection this difference can matter a lot.
192 VBR OPUS and 320 VBR LAME MP3 are equally transparent. The quality depends more on mastering than bitrate, beyond 160k on MP3.
I guess my collection’s just not big enough for this to have become an issue.
As a music producer, you notice 192k MP3. The next jumps you probably don’t notice. I’m still a flac snob because I have to work a lot with original quality files, but for the average users there’s probably not even a difference between MP3 192k+ and flac or wav or opus or whatever.
AAC-LC is patent free too nowadays (not HE-AAC, but that’s mainly useful for low-bitrate stuff).
good to know