MP3 is really, really smart. Like seriously.
Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death. It should be the opposite! It's now free for everyone and in the public domain, and that is cause for celebration.
Not sure why anyone would regard a patent expiration as a sign of its death. It should be the opposite! It's now free for everyone and in the public domain, and that is cause for celebration.
As it stands though, we just get to apply Occham: in online news media, A/Bing truth vs lies for clicks has a clear winner.
The writers at all the AOL and Gawker franchises are the end result of this trend - a million monkeys sitting at typewriters.
I don't regret ripping my entire collection as AAC / lossless but I also acknowledge that the space savings are basically a waste of time for anyone not using good speakers / headphones in a very quiet environment, and outside of a handful of pieces susceptible to pre-echo lossless was a hedge against double-encoding in the somewhat unlikely event that the future codec landscape changes dramatically.
Rhetorical questions...
Who are these people for whom the thought of not making that money causes them such stress and anguish?
...furthermore, what were they like as children?
How so/any links or search terms for the aspects you're impressed by?
And also [1] is a good read.
[0] http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-h...
A lot of the advances came from the psycho-acoustic modeling and VBR algorithms from the LAME devs.
I remember doing a comparison test way back in the late 90s between an officially licensed MP3 encoder and LAME on the same set of music WAV files, and was simply blown away when I could actually hear a difference in the results. Being the sort of anti-audiophile that I am, I then reduced the bitrate of the LAME encoding until I could just barely tell that it was too low, so that I could cram more music onto my hard drive, make playlists, and record them at 1x speed through the line-out port to an audio cassette tape, for my car stereo.
At the time, LAME made the smallest file sizes for the crap music quality that I tolerate. Nowadays, I encode at minimum of 96k/sec (sometimes better) just to annoy other people around me less, and to cut down on the suggestions that I get some real speakers for my phone. It ain't the speaker, folks; that's pretty much the best quality I can discern with my own ears.
When it comes to music, I think people pay far too much attention to audiophile opinions, and perhaps not enough to those who have physiological limitations on their enjoyment of music and/or recognition of speech-frequency sounds. But yeah, even I could tell when someone used a crappy encoder on their MP3 files. That's why I always ripped my own CDs, or specifically sought out lossless-encoded files, so that I could then use LAME to get an acceptable and consistent level of crappiness. Even now, I only download FLAC, and transcode my own MP3s for portable devices.