The MP3 Is Officially Dead

Mchart said:
Storage and internet bandwidth are such that there is no reason to not just distribute standard 16 bit @ 44.1khz .wav files and then let people do whatever they want with the raw PCM stream.
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Yeah there is basically no point to switch from one lossy format to another. AAC may be a bit more efficient but we aren't using dial-up and zip disks anymore. If we are going to switch to anything it should be WAV or FLAC, possibly even going beyond 16bit/44.1khz that CDs have been stuck at for decades.

Of course in reality this is about profits/licencing as others have pointed out. It has nothing to do with efficiency or file sizes/bitrates.
 
I remember going to friends' homes and downloading MP3's from Napster since we were stuck with 56K and all my friends had 6mbps cable.
Took a couple of years for us to finally get cable internet in my area.
 
MrBonk said:
AAC? Fuck that. Use OGG. It's royalty free. Otherwise FLAC or bust.
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Ogg is a container, I'm pretty sure you mean use Ogg Vorbis which is the actual audio compression encoder, and the best such Vorbis encoder is the one by AoTuV (page is in Japanese so you might need to use Google Translate or something similar if needed).

Of course, Opus is still better at lower bitrates for audio quality and it's license/royalty free as well, just not supported by every media player out there but the better ones do support it.
 
Darkswordz said:
MP3...Winamp...all my old friends are passing away.
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d214484225b1a98e811957e3a2b45ec4_saddo-boxing-still-going-strong-i-am-glad-to-see-pour-one-out-for-the-homies-meme_620-350.jpeg
 
Simmonz said:
I use FLAC for as much of my audio that I can.
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Same here. Also I'm still a big Winamp user. I use it for all my music, mainly FLAC and MP3s (along with ogg vorbis and others), but the biggest reason I stuck with Winamp all these years is due to the game console audio chip emulator plugins I use. A lot of my video game music library is made up of file formats such as .nsf, .spc, .miniusf, .gym, .vgm, .gbs, and more. I also rely on an OpenAL output plugin.
 
Most people can't tell the difference between 16 bit vs 24 bit interpolation for most modern recordings thanks to the loudness war. I bet even with ABCX test, most people on this thread can't tell the difference between an LAME encoded MP3 (V3 preset) from a PCM 24 bit 192Khz file in a normal environment. Very few people, even on this thread, will have a quite room to even have a chance to be able tell the difference.
 
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Chupachup said:
Comic genius! You had me at FLAC. But, I did a full on spit take as I read Tidal!

Don't get me wrong! DSD and FLAC are A-W-E-S-O-M-E when and where you care about maintaining the fullest possible range in audio playback and in that sense, i.e., home theater/sound studio- it's where you'd like to be. However, they have a long way to go before they can be considered mainstream, i.e, car stereos, mobile devices, etc., e.g., where it's truly at.

Tidal? ... where to begin...
Jay Z's making it rain personally while Tidal simply seems to flounder as a business with a great M.C. always making a sales pitch that seems too good to be true.

From my own view as a consumer- using a four minute average play time per track, I have just over 2,200 hours of music ripped from CDs that I own and music I've purchased online that cover most of the popular and some not-so-popular genres from the 1930's to present.

My library grows almost daily as I purchase new tracks and albums I like as I'm listening to them on the radio or perusing online. That library is sync'd in its entirety with my laptop on a regular basis and my phone has ~8-10 hours of that music on it sync'd from any one or number of favorites lists I've created on either system. So, my music is pretty much wherever I am.

No streaming service can prove themselves worthy of my money when I already own the music I want to listen to, I can change it out in less time than it takes to recharge the battery on my phone and I don't have to worry about using up my mobile data;)

As for "exclusives", they fall into the same category as "pre-ordered video games", I can wait until the early adopter reviews are out and, if I like what I've heard, often buy-in at lower price:) Being first has little or no tangible long term benefit in either case.

Buuuut, if you/others like the service, then it means it's fulfilling your current requirements and needs. I am not and can not throw shade on you or the service from that perspective. It's a very personal choice and has to be respected as such:angelic:
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You forgot one very important point in your post, streaming quality.

Its the only streaming service to offer full on 16/44khz aka CD quality and their masters are well above that, other streaming services mess with the stream big time.

If you like buying and ripping cd's so be it, I dont and until apple or some other streaming service offer CD or SACD quality audio then it looks like I and many others are stuck with tidal regardless of your dislikes.
 
MaZa said:
I'm not sure if my car audio amplifier supports AAC. I'll stick to MP3's, thank you.
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A car headunit should support AAC if it supports MP3 and was manufactured sometime in the last 15 years.
 
CRaschNet said:
Most people can't tell the difference between 16 bit vs 24 bit interpolation for most modern recordings thanks to the loudness war.
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Luckily not all music has been affected by the loudness wars. Plus you can do different mastering for different versions. A lot of music that is released on vinyl has less compression and more dynamic range than the exact same album in CD/MP3/AAC. It's just a bit silly with how far technology has come that a lot of times the best quality and mastering you can get is still vinyl (or recording the vinyl as WAV/FLAC)

Whether you can personally tell the difference or not it would be trivially easy for them to just release music in better quality. Virtually no one records in 16bit. I suppose there really isn't much demand for it though in the age of crappy earbuds and bargin bin speakers. Plus a lot of people's idea of "good" sound is just cranking the bass/sub to 11. Now get off my lawn :p
 
Posted this before so I'll post it again since it's somewhat relevant:

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

The purpose of using higher resolution is primary for the recording process itself to allow for more headroom and dynamics during that recording when it happens in a studio (assuming it's done with actual musical instruments and not all computer generated stuff which of course can have dynamics as well depending). Once the stuff is laid down and recorded the higher resolution also allows for editing to be more precise in many respects and with the use of a lot of digital filters and processing nowadays it ends up keeping more of "the original sound" around after such processing has effectively mutilated things.

But as for the final end result, science itself can prove that 16-bit 44.1 kHz is more than adequate to cover the entire range of human hearing - I've met a lot of people that say they have the fabled "golden ears" but when you put them in a situation with legitimate ABX testing methodologies they can't do anything like they claim their ears are capable of and of course then they go on a tirade blaming the testing methodology itself or blaming the audio samples used, anything to reject the idea that their hearing isn't what they profess it to be.

The "high resolution audio" thing is nothing but a gimmick and truly a waste of space on storage but whatever, once someone sets their mind into the belief that it truly matters and that they can truly hear a difference then nobody is ever going to alter that belief regardless of how much data you throw at 'em as proof they're full of shit. ;)

When people end up getting "bionic ears" that provide useful info to the central nervous system and our brains can actually interpret and recognize audio above the ~20 kHz top end that humans are limited by then I suppose those folk might have some ground to stand on. Until that happens, of course, they can take their high bitrate files and shove 'em in those same ears all they damned well please. :D

I've paid for a lot of music in my lifetime, but I'm not interested in paying for the same music a second time around (or third, or whatever) just because someone tells me it sounds better than what I heard the first time around because it just ain't so.

Also, as noted, the "Loudness War" affects most everything in the past 30 years. Hell, I have an album by Rush, "Grace Under Pressure," one of my all-time favorite albums by my all-time favorite band that I purchased way back in 1986 and it sounds absolutely wonderful by today's standards. It has a DR (Dynamic Range, a plugin for foobar2000) of 13 which is considered pretty damned good overall - contrast that with a pressing of the exact same album but released in 2015 that I found recently in a pawn shop - the same music, but the volume has been boosted through the fucking roof and this newer pressing has a DR of 7 overall. The idiots that decided to release this new CD in a fresh pressing (it's not a special release or anything, just a new CD produced in 2015 because the album still sells) had whoever working on the mastering for it just go bonkers with the audio levels which of course absolutely ruins it totally.

When you can take a CD from the 1980s when recording engineers and mastering professionals actually respected the "industry standards" for volume levels and contrast that with most anything from today - even in my example above which is the same exact music from the same exact band and the same exact analog masters - that get remixed and volume boosted to the stratosphere, it's no wonder people are literally killing their hearing anymore.

Humans, I tell ya, we ruin everything we touch. :D
 
Hell I still use Mp3Pro format and will comtinue because in a truck going you will not hear any real difference.......I am not redoing my 30000 plus mp3pro collection......
 
I just re-ripped a bunch of my CDs. I was surprised to find low bitrate (192kbps) was causing some very minor sound quality issues. So, I had to go back and do that several times for some CDs. These are all MP3s.

Yesterday I tried some different formats because of this article. For giggles. Only FLAC plays without additional plug-ins or new software/hardware. FLAC generates pretty big file sizes and I have over 20GB of MP3s. Not switching to FLAC.

On the loudness wars/dynamic range issue, I'm the enemy. If I turn on the music, I expect to actually hear the music. If I have music playing on random and it suddenly "turns off", it's because of dynamic range. I pretty much hate it and I am old enough to know quiet songs. I have classical music, but I still hate quiet recordings. They can play the original music however they want, but if the recording is intentionally quiet I boost it back up, so I can hear it. The whole point of musicians playing music is so that other people can hear it.
 
I'm against brick walling but it works the other way too. Ideally I think tracks should be normalised to -1 dB or so and have noticeable dynamic range differences. However, it should be so that you can clearly hear all segments without having to touch the volume. That way the volume is predictable.

Two examples (EDM/trance), this is pretty well mastered considering the content and it makes good use of dynamic range:
clipboard-1uibs9.png

^^You can clearly see the segments.

This, however, is a big no no:
clipboard-2huysc.png

^^Kinda hard to say what's going on... The thing is... If this would have had similar dynamic range than in above tracks, it would have been much better.

I have pretty sensitive hearing and can't take sudden blasts well. That's why I adjust the volume so that any tracks that is blasting at full volume would be comfortable to listen. By the way, if I do not use the volume pot that came with my Zx I'd have to use ~3 % Windows volume if I'd plug my Sennheiser HD 595s directly in the card's line out. Headphone out would be even worse.
 
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Tup3x said:
I'm against brick walling but it works the other way too. Ideally I think tracks should be normalised to -1 dB or so and have noticeable dynamic range differences. However, it should be so that you can clearly hear all segments without having to touch the volume. That way the volume is predictable.

Two examples (EDM/trance), this is pretty well mastered considering the content and it makes good use of dynamic range:
clipboard-1uibs9.png


This, however, is a big no no:
clipboard-2huysc.png


I have pretty sensitive hearing and can't take sudden blasts well. That's why I adjust the volume so that any tracks that is blasting at full volume would be comfortable to listen. By the way, if I do not use the volume pot that came with my Zx I'd have to use ~3 % Windows volume if I'd plug my Sennheiser HD 595s directly in the card's line out. Headphone out would be even worse.
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I'm not saying there is no place for dynamic range compression. It is a tool like any other in the mastering and mixing toolbox. It depends on how you use it though.

I ABSOLUTELY HATE when they run the entire finished track through a compressor targeting a fixed loudness.

What used to always bother me on house/trance/whatever dancy electronic tracks is when they did this, where the background pads would suddenly get much louder when the intense parts of the song died down.

Stuff like that drove me nuts.
 
Tiberian said:
It has a DR (Dynamic Range, a plugin for foobar2000) of 13 which is considered pretty damned good overall - contrast that with a pressing of the exact same album but released in 2015 that I found recently in a pawn shop - the same music, but the volume has been boosted through the fucking roof and this newer pressing has a DR of 7 overall. The idiots that decided to release this new CD in a fresh pressing (it's not a special release or anything, just a new CD produced in 2015 because the album still sells) had whoever working on the mastering for it just go bonkers with the audio levels which of course absolutely ruins it totally.

Humans, I tell ya, we ruin everything we touch. :D
Click to expand...

I agree with everything except for the dynamic range argument. Because of the loudness war people tout dynamic range like it's the best thing since sliced bread. My song has 12 dynamic range so it's automatically better than x song because it only has a DR of 6. In the case of Rush, it makes sense that if the artist intended their tracks to have a DR of 13, then I would want their music to have a DR of 13. That newer pressing is bad because it's altering the vision of the artist when they made the song. But there are also plenty of songs where a large dynamic range has no real benefit, so it's not something that is required to make a song good. If there is too much of a volume swing I'd probably end up compressing it some anyway because you can't always use it if the environment your listening in won't allow it. With that I mean if you're using headphones in a noisy environment with say an 80dB noise floor, you probably can't hear your music over the environment until it's like a minimum of 87 dB. So in the case of Rush the loud parts would need to be 100dB for you to get the full effect. Probably not the most comfortable scenario for you to hear music. (I'm sure people can nit pick everything about that sentence, but it's an example of the principal) Same goes for if it's really quiet and others are trying to sleep. If you're in a quiet area that's like 30dB, your music will be a lot louder than the environment if you are trying to get the full effect. When you can use all of the DR on something that was intended to have it, obviously that will be a great listening experience, but simply having more DR isn't always a good thing.
 
The point of dynamic range isn't the overall volume level of the audio itself which should still be done to the still industry standard of 89 dB within a decibel or two if possible but of course the "brick wall" aspects that have plagued the recording industry for 20+ years now is they push everything as close to 100 dB as possible. I get that some audio has quiet parts - let's face it, if you're attempting to listen to classical music with IEMs on a city bus or public transportation you're going to be "volume starved" more often than not unless you own something like a pair of Etymotic IEMs that by design block out a significant portion of ambient audio (more than most IEMs by a decent margin). Even so, that doesn't mean the original recording has to be brick walled during the mastering process but that trend isn't going to stop anytime soon, sadly.

I have some extremely well done vinyl rips in 24 bit 96 kHz format and they do "sound" better to my own ears (I say "sound" there because how something actually sounds is a purely subjective thing that cannot be measured by any equipment whatsoever, what "sounds" fine or great to me might make someone else wince, who knows) than a modern day remastering of the same audio, the example I provided of a Rush album is just one of those. I have an original pressing of Bruce Hornsby & The Range "The Way It Is" on CD from way back in the mid-1980s, and I have a very well done vinyl rip of it, and again I recently found a newer pressing of the same album from 2013 at a pawn shop (hey, they have CDs cheap, what can I say) and in a comparison the newest pressing has the brick wall mastering done on it and it just really sounds horrible to my ears in comparison to the original CD pressing from long ago and especially compared to the vinyl rip.

I'm not saying I'm a big huge fan of the high resolution stuff, it's a placebo thing more than anything else really but vinyl DOES have a natural frequency response that reaches into the 40-50 kHz range (seriously, it does, do some research on it). Now while humans obviously cannot consciously hear frequencies at such extremes it still plays into how we perceive the harmonics and provides what most of us would consider "ambience" or an airiness (for lack of a better descriptive term) to the quality of the audio during playback. Nothing will ever truly match the live performance as it was being captured, that much is pretty obvious - well I suppose maybe someday we'll have devices like those in the movie "Strange Days" where you can record a person's experience fully then someone else can play it back and get exactly the same experience in every respect.

I only have a handful of vinyl rips and I got them precisely for comparison purposes - I could easily convert them to my portable format which is Opus 128 Kbps VBR files and I doubt I'd really notice much of a difference overall considering they're encoded for use in portable devices and not in a sound auditioning lab so it's good enough for me on the go using my smartphone and IEMs. I rooted my device so I could adjust the default audio levels a bit higher than the norm and it can easily power my IEMs without issues now. I recently owned an LG V20 and used the "Hi-Fi quad DAC" for a while and it was nice but again, since I know what I can and can't hear (as well as what other humans typically can and can't hear) I don't allow myself to get stuck thinking that listening to extreme bitrate content is going to really matter at all in the long run.

All this is academic, of course, since I do actually listen to the music I have and I don't dissect it constantly looking for sonic anomalies where I can pick them out and complain to the developer of the particular psychoacoustic audio compression format I used. It sounds fine to me and that's all that matters in the long run. :D
 
Tiberian said:
The point of dynamic range isn't the overall volume level of the audio itself which should still be done to the still industry standard of 89 dB within a decibel or two if possible but of course the "brick wall" aspects that have plagued the recording industry for 20+ years now is they push everything as close to 100 dB as possible. I get that some audio has quiet parts - let's face it, if you're attempting to listen to classical music with IEMs on a city bus or public transportation you're going to be "volume starved" more often than not unless you own something like a pair of Etymotic IEMs that by design block out a significant portion of ambient audio (more than most IEMs by a decent margin). Even so, that doesn't mean the original recording has to be brick walled during the mastering process but that trend isn't going to stop anytime soon, sadly.

I have some extremely well done vinyl rips in 24 bit 96 kHz format and they do "sound" better to my own ears (I say "sound" there because how something actually sounds is a purely subjective thing that cannot be measured by any equipment whatsoever, what "sounds" fine or great to me might make someone else wince, who knows) than a modern day remastering of the same audio, the example I provided of a Rush album is just one of those. I have an original pressing of Bruce Hornsby & The Range "The Way It Is" on CD from way back in the mid-1980s, and I have a very well done vinyl rip of it, and again I recently found a newer pressing of the same album from 2013 at a pawn shop (hey, they have CDs cheap, what can I say) and in a comparison the newest pressing has the brick wall mastering done on it and it just really sounds horrible to my ears in comparison to the original CD pressing from long ago and especially compared to the vinyl rip.

I'm not saying I'm a big huge fan of the high resolution stuff, it's a placebo thing more than anything else really but vinyl DOES have a natural frequency response that reaches into the 40-50 kHz range (seriously, it does, do some research on it). Now while humans obviously cannot consciously hear frequencies at such extremes it still plays into how we perceive the harmonics and provides what most of us would consider "ambience" or an airiness (for lack of a better descriptive term) to the quality of the audio during playback. Nothing will ever truly match the live performance as it was being captured, that much is pretty obvious - well I suppose maybe someday we'll have devices like those in the movie "Strange Days" where you can record a person's experience fully then someone else can play it back and get exactly the same experience in every respect.

I only have a handful of vinyl rips and I got them precisely for comparison purposes - I could easily convert them to my portable format which is Opus 128 Kbps VBR files and I doubt I'd really notice much of a difference overall considering they're encoded for use in portable devices and not in a sound auditioning lab so it's good enough for me on the go using my smartphone and IEMs. I rooted my device so I could adjust the default audio levels a bit higher than the norm and it can easily power my IEMs without issues now. I recently owned an LG V20 and used the "Hi-Fi quad DAC" for a while and it was nice but again, since I know what I can and can't hear (as well as what other humans typically can and can't hear) I don't allow myself to get stuck thinking that listening to extreme bitrate content is going to really matter at all in the long run.

All this is academic, of course, since I do actually listen to the music I have and I don't dissect it constantly looking for sonic anomalies where I can pick them out and complain to the developer of the particular psychoacoustic audio compression format I used. It sounds fine to me and that's all that matters in the long run. :D
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I simply don't listen to music when I am out and about.

Problem solved.

Either I'm at home with my good speakers or good headphones or I just don't listen. I'd rather have no music at all than the "IEM's on a bus" experience.

I demand the full dynamic range, and couldn't care less about he quiet parts not being audible on a bus.
 
Tiberian said:
"Welcome to the minority..."
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I'm well aware.

I'ts just that once I've experienced what music CAN sound like, nothing less will do. I can't enjoy the music anymore, because all I can think of is how much it sounds like ass.

It's not just music though. It's engrained in my personality. I'm a quality over quantity type of guy. Because of this, I may have fewer things, and fewer hobbies than most people at my income level, but when I do get something, it's not going to be some half-assed budget variety.

For instance, if I can't watch a film on my home theater system, I'd rather just not watch it, and see it later when I can experience it in its full glory.

I haven't more than briefly touched a console since I got my first PC in 1991 and permanently retired the 8bit Nintendo. I'd rather not play games at all, than have to play them on an inferior console.

I haven't been to a fast food place (McDonalds, Burger King, etc.) in almost 20 years. When I eat out, I eat quality foods. Because of this I eat out less often, but that's well worth it.

I'd never be happy driving a Toyota. If I couldn't afford a car with more precise road feel, and handling, I'd rather go without a car at all, then own a Toyota.

Etc. etc. etc.

For me something is either "pro-sumer"/good quality or I just go without. I wind up going without a lot, but that doesn't matter to me, because the good stuff I have is that much more awesome.
 
Tiberian said:
Posted this before so I'll post it again since it's somewhat relevant:

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

The purpose of using higher resolution is primary for the recording process itself to allow for more headroom and dynamics during that recording when it happens in a studio (assuming it's done with actual musical instruments and not all computer generated stuff which of course can have dynamics as well depending). Once the stuff is laid down and recorded the higher resolution also allows for editing to be more precise in many respects and with the use of a lot of digital filters and processing nowadays it ends up keeping more of "the original sound" around after such processing has effectively mutilated things.

But as for the final end result, science itself can prove that 16-bit 44.1 kHz is more than adequate to cover the entire range of human hearing - I've met a lot of people that say they have the fabled "golden ears" but when you put them in a situation with legitimate ABX testing methodologies they can't do anything like they claim their ears are capable of and of course then they go on a tirade blaming the testing methodology itself or blaming the audio samples used, anything to reject the idea that their hearing isn't what they profess it to be.

The "high resolution audio" thing is nothing but a gimmick and truly a waste of space on storage but whatever, once someone sets their mind into the belief that it truly matters and that they can truly hear a difference then nobody is ever going to alter that belief regardless of how much data you throw at 'em as proof they're full of shit. ;)

When people end up getting "bionic ears" that provide useful info to the central nervous system and our brains can actually interpret and recognize audio above the ~20 kHz top end that humans are limited by then I suppose those folk might have some ground to stand on. Until that happens, of course, they can take their high bitrate files and shove 'em in those same ears all they damned well please. :D

I've paid for a lot of music in my lifetime, but I'm not interested in paying for the same music a second time around (or third, or whatever) just because someone tells me it sounds better than what I heard the first time around because it just ain't so.

Also, as noted, the "Loudness War" affects most everything in the past 30 years. Hell, I have an album by Rush, "Grace Under Pressure," one of my all-time favorite albums by my all-time favorite band that I purchased way back in 1986 and it sounds absolutely wonderful by today's standards. It has a DR (Dynamic Range, a plugin for foobar2000) of 13 which is considered pretty damned good overall - contrast that with a pressing of the exact same album but released in 2015 that I found recently in a pawn shop - the same music, but the volume has been boosted through the fucking roof and this newer pressing has a DR of 7 overall. The idiots that decided to release this new CD in a fresh pressing (it's not a special release or anything, just a new CD produced in 2015 because the album still sells) had whoever working on the mastering for it just go bonkers with the audio levels which of course absolutely ruins it totally.

When you can take a CD from the 1980s when recording engineers and mastering professionals actually respected the "industry standards" for volume levels and contrast that with most anything from today - even in my example above which is the same exact music from the same exact band and the same exact analog masters - that get remixed and volume boosted to the stratosphere, it's no wonder people are literally killing their hearing anymore.

Humans, I tell ya, we ruin everything we touch. :D
Click to expand...

Oh I definitely agree mastering is a much bigger problem than bit depth and sampling rates for the "finished product". It just seems like audiophile snob formats (such as vinyl) tend to get better mastering even with brand new albums, so I wish there was more widespread adoption of digital audiophile snob formats/filetypes as well.

As great as vinyl sounds it's WAY less convienant than a quick download and being able to play any album/song at will. It also requires some maintenance (mainly the arm and cartridge) and care to prevent degradation which isn't an issue with digital.
 
Tiberian said:
Posted this before so I'll post it again since it's somewhat relevant:

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

The purpose of using higher resolution is primary for the recording process itself to allow for more headroom and dynamics during that recording when it happens in a studio (assuming it's done with actual musical instruments and not all computer generated stuff which of course can have dynamics as well depending). Once the stuff is laid down and recorded the higher resolution also allows for editing to be more precise in many respects and with the use of a lot of digital filters and processing nowadays it ends up keeping more of "the original sound" around after such processing has effectively mutilated things.

But as for the final end result, science itself can prove that 16-bit 44.1 kHz is more than adequate to cover the entire range of human hearing - I've met a lot of people that say they have the fabled "golden ears" but when you put them in a situation with legitimate ABX testing methodologies they can't do anything like they claim their ears are capable of and of course then they go on a tirade blaming the testing methodology itself or blaming the audio samples used, anything to reject the idea that their hearing isn't what they profess it to be.

The "high resolution audio" thing is nothing but a gimmick and truly a waste of space on storage but whatever, once someone sets their mind into the belief that it truly matters and that they can truly hear a difference then nobody is ever going to alter that belief regardless of how much data you throw at 'em as proof they're full of shit. ;)

When people end up getting "bionic ears" that provide useful info to the central nervous system and our brains can actually interpret and recognize audio above the ~20 kHz top end that humans are limited by then I suppose those folk might have some ground to stand on. Until that happens, of course, they can take their high bitrate files and shove 'em in those same ears all they damned well please. :D

I've paid for a lot of music in my lifetime, but I'm not interested in paying for the same music a second time around (or third, or whatever) just because someone tells me it sounds better than what I heard the first time around because it just ain't so.

Also, as noted, the "Loudness War" affects most everything in the past 30 years. Hell, I have an album by Rush, "Grace Under Pressure," one of my all-time favorite albums by my all-time favorite band that I purchased way back in 1986 and it sounds absolutely wonderful by today's standards. It has a DR (Dynamic Range, a plugin for foobar2000) of 13 which is considered pretty damned good overall - contrast that with a pressing of the exact same album but released in 2015 that I found recently in a pawn shop - the same music, but the volume has been boosted through the fucking roof and this newer pressing has a DR of 7 overall. The idiots that decided to release this new CD in a fresh pressing (it's not a special release or anything, just a new CD produced in 2015 because the album still sells) had whoever working on the mastering for it just go bonkers with the audio levels which of course absolutely ruins it totally.

When you can take a CD from the 1980s when recording engineers and mastering professionals actually respected the "industry standards" for volume levels and contrast that with most anything from today - even in my example above which is the same exact music from the same exact band and the same exact analog masters - that get remixed and volume boosted to the stratosphere, it's no wonder people are literally killing their hearing anymore.

Humans, I tell ya, we ruin everything we touch. :D
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Fully agree.

High resolution and lossless formats are of the greatest benefits during the content creation / editing / mastering phase of things.

The impact on the final product is minimal if any at all if it is distributed lossless or high resolution.
 
Basically they want you to use AAC where they still get royalty money. They get none for mp3 recordings. MP3 format is going nowhere. Amazon, Google, Microsoft all sell it.

No real news here.

As for sound quality, I do 90% of my listening on headphones or in the car and can't tell a difference between Lame 320 mp3 or flac or AAC or Apple lossless. I keep everything at Lame 320.

So there:)
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
I'm not saying there is no place for dynamic range compression. It is a tool like any other in the mastering and mixing toolbox. It depends on how you use it though.

I ABSOLUTELY HATE when they run the entire finished track through a compressor targeting a fixed loudness.

What used to always bother me on house/trance/whatever dancy electronic tracks is when they did this, where the background pads would suddenly get much louder when the intense parts of the song died down.

Stuff like that drove me nuts.
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I absolutely hate it too when they brickwall tracks. Proper use of dynamic range can really boost the track further (and it usually clearly shows in waveform view).

That being said, inside a car heavy dynamic range compression could be handy - however, that's something you could do in real time based on car speed/tyre noise. However, tracks shouldn't be like that out of the box because in proper listening environment they should just bad. I avoid listening to music in loud environments since it just is impossible to fight the noise even with heavy dynamic range compression (and I don't want to blast my hearing to oblivion). I haven't used nor tried closed noise cancelling headphones though but I doubt those make that big difference
 
I'll switch to FLAC once I upgrade to a vehicle that can support it. Until then, MP3 it is.
 
One flac song could end up being 30MB....

And flac is for Hi-Fi devices.
 
MrBonk said:
AAC? Fuck that. Use OGG. It's royalty free. Otherwise FLAC or bust.
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Well ... Vorbis, technically. Ogg is the container file format. Surely Vorbis has improved over the years. I always thought MP3 artifacts were the least offensive, Vorbis had strange artifacts (lower bitrates), and WMA was horrible at lower bitrates.

Ooh, so Xiph is working to supplant Vorbis with Opus now?
 
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Same here. I have 180gb of music, most ripped from CD, some purchased on Amazon mp3, Google play, etc.

I still buy CD's often because lot of the time the CD with autorip on Amazon is cheaper than the mp3 by itself.



Chupachup said:
Comic genius! You had me at FLAC. But, I did a full on spit take as I read Tidal!

Don't get me wrong! DSD and FLAC are A-W-E-S-O-M-E when and where you care about maintaining the fullest possible range in audio playback and in that sense, i.e., home theater/sound studio- it's where you'd like to be. However, they have a long way to go before they can be considered mainstream, i.e, car stereos, mobile devices, etc., e.g., where it's truly at.

Tidal? ... where to begin...
Jay Z's making it rain personally while Tidal simply seems to flounder as a business with a great M.C. always making a sales pitch that seems too good to be true.

From my own view as a consumer- using a four minute average play time per track, I have just over 2,200 hours of music ripped from CDs that I own and music I've purchased online that cover most of the popular and some not-so-popular genres from the 1930's to present.

My library grows almost daily as I purchase new tracks and albums I like as I'm listening to them on the radio or perusing online. That library is sync'd in its entirety with my laptop on a regular basis and my phone has ~8-10 hours of that music on it sync'd from any one or number of favorites lists I've created on either system. So, my music is pretty much wherever I am.

No streaming service can prove themselves worthy of my money when I already own the music I want to listen to, I can change it out in less time than it takes to recharge the battery on my phone and I don't have to worry about using up my mobile data;)

As for "exclusives", they fall into the same category as "pre-ordered video games", I can wait until the early adopter reviews are out and, if I like what I've heard, often buy-in at lower price:) Being first has little or no tangible long term benefit in either case.

Buuuut, if you/others like the service, then it means it's fulfilling your current requirements and needs. I am not and can not throw shade on you or the service from that perspective. It's a very personal choice and has to be respected as such:angelic:
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snowcrash said:
WAV uncompressed for me. Space is never a concern for me.
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THIS..................
I NEVER liked MP3, I always thought the sound quality sucked even with high encode rates.
But I found FLAC acceptable But years ago I ripped my entire CD collection to WAV tracks and archived them on DVDs.
Whenever I had a whim to listen to an old album I always would think "how can I make it better".
I would load the WAV album track per track, and tweak it's sound in Audacity, in effect "remastering" better to my liking; then the output was back to a CD, or FLAC, or MP3 many time since much of the time that is the only format many car players would recognize.
 
I know we say space is unlimited but for people who love music (my wife for example) her phone is already bursting at the seams with apps, pics, and videos let alone adding her extensive music library. 192 VBR is totally fine as long as it's encoded properly and saves a ton of room. If someone is an audiophile and wants to keep uncompressed files on their mechanical hard drive to play back through their DAC and $500 headphones, i totally get it. But for a phone with only 32gb of storage being played back on some $20 earbuds, I think MP3 makes all the sense in the world.
 
What exact problem are they talking about here?

"The engineers who developed the MP3 were working with incomplete information about how our brains process sonic information, and so the MP3 itself was working on false assumptions about how holistically we hear. As psychoacoustic research has evolved, so has the technology that we use to listen. New audio formats and products, with richer information and that better address mobile music streaming, are arriving."

And yes, I agree 16bit @ 44.1Khz is more than enough, science proofs it. My signal professor teacher with PhD, said 24bit 96khz was only for audiophiles, and that the end result will not sound better to our ears. Nyquist theorem proofs this.
 
joseardzm said:
What exact problem are they talking about here?

"The engineers who developed the MP3 were working with incomplete information about how our brains process sonic information, and so the MP3 itself was working on false assumptions about how holistically we hear. As psychoacoustic research has evolved, so has the technology that we use to listen. New audio formats and products, with richer information and that better address mobile music streaming, are arriving."

And yes, I agree 16bit @ 44.1Khz is more than enough, science proofs it. My signal professor teacher with PhD, said 24bit 96khz was only for audiophiles, and that the end result will not sound better to our ears. Nyquist theorem proofs this.
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I'll have to find the research, but it sounds like they're just trying to come off as smart to convince users to move to their newest licensed format.
 
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