It's not dead, although as storage prices continue to decline, one wonders why you would still compress audio you care about with a lossy codec.
Maybe, once most people, even in the third world, have unlimited data plans, music file sizes will stop mattering. Or maybe we will have moved on to something else entirely where big files is still an issue. Maybe people will want to stream music from earth to space stations or lunar bases, I don't know.
¹ Yes, this is the ultimate in unreliable anecdote, sorry.
If you want or need your library in another format at some point you really should not transcode from a lossy source. You may say that won't ever happen, but storage is cheap it's very short sighted to risk being locked into one format. It's not something you could easily fix later.
Except that lossless audio is far from hidden and widely available as soon as you look past the iTunes store. I buy my music in a lossless digital format exclusively and frequently - from multiple stores, without any DRM and with no problems at all finding it. If the music industry tried to lock the lossless source away, I'd say it does a very bad job.
Could you give an example of some?
- Boomkat
- Qobuz
- Bleep
- Artist and label stores
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There are others like HDTracks, but they always seem to be selling snake oil to audiophiles. Just my impression. I don't see any point in paying extra for more than CD-quality. I draw the line at 16 Bit / 44.1 KHz.
Most importantly, audio CDs still use uncompressed WAV. Buying and ripping the audio CD for a popular album is a pretty surefire method for getting a lossless copy, even if it's not always the easiest.
Never convert between lossy formats, not even once.
MP3 is more widely supported than any lossless audio codec. Lossless compression enables the collector to keep an original.
Not everyone is a collector though - for them, MP3 is probably fine, and if they need a different format later they'll probably just stream, re-encode, or re-purchase, in order of likelihood.
Most people don't care about that
If I play only 128k mp3s on a modern hi-fi system, I can tell the difference. I prefer FLAC myself. It's a little more space, but at least I know I have a real archive of a CD.
I have rips of some good bands bands that never made it past the bar scene and who abandoned their MySpace pages long ago, so it's nice to know I have a preserved copy I can share with other audio-nerds.
Anyway, anecdote time:
I was actually part of a double blind test.
On a really really good setup with very little background noise I can tell that there is a difference at 320kbit (encoded using LAME) with about 65% reliablity for short pieces of music, which was the second best in the group.
I could not, however, say which sample was better.
128 is just barely good enough to be tolerable for a lot of people, but nobody would claim it's transparent. AAC does a lot better at that bitrate.
As someone who grew up loving music while listing to Nth generation tape copies on a really shitty walkman I just don't understand this line of reasoning.
It's great that audiophiles can hear so well, but when they start talking about tubes and premium cables and vinyl records and gold-plated contacts, I just want to give them an otitis media infection that cuts them down to my level. You just don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. I know that's wrong to wish such ill upon others, but it's so much harder to suppress my envy when I'm being inundated by what appears from my perspective to be superstitious nonsense.
As someone who can still somehow enjoy music when it's encoded as a 64k/s MP3 file, I am baffled as to how someone can say the very same music can be bad at 128k/s. I'm just glad that I can still hear it at all!
More generally, this applies to any scenario where the sound is distorted or altered by something. A crappy speaker might have a perverse frequency response. A room reflection might manifest as a comb filter. Both will destroy the careful masking assumptions of any psychoacoustic model.
Lossy compression should be avoided as an archival format whenever possible, even if you think you know better, because you never know when you might need the information you thoughtlessly threw away.
And even if it were, that doesn't make it worthwhile. Gzip compresses plain text by a factor of 4 or 8 and is lossless in the absolute sense, but most of us don't keep our text files in .gz form.
Text files are not a good analogy, as they have a different workflow compared to musical files.
I use ZFS and NTFS compression on all the things. For example, ~/.android on my desktop: "Size 1.49 GB, Size on disk 293 MB". Not everything compresses as nicely but in general you can save a lot of space on a desktop.
And how many decades from now do you expect that to be the situation?
I think MP3 and us are going to be fine for quite a while. This is after, all not a bug that needs to be fixed.
Basically I don't think about this is a "problem" and this I don't agree about the "pushing it ahead of us" metaphor.
If I want to store some really high quality audio, I'd use something like FLAC. But for general listening? Nah, MP3-320 is fine.