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Comment by ozzmotik | Hacker News Reader

always nice to see something of such utility pop up. musicbrainz has most assuredly been around for what seems like forever now, and there's a reason for that. their tag database is second to none as far as im concerned. unfortunately for me, the only music I keep locally is my own music that I've made, and I can almost guarantee that that wouldn't be on there. plus i tag all my music properly to a point that might seem religious and obsessive because I hate music files without metadata (which is why I export in mp3 as well as wav; wav for higher quality, and mp3 for labeling purposes; I could probably just use flac but compressed audio like mp3 also has the benefit of being less space intensive).

either way, nice to see it

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If you want your own music to be properly tagged with MBIDs you could just add it to the database yourself!

Unlike Wikipedia, there is truly nothing too niche to be part of MB's database. My favourite is a CD with the music that plays while you're on hold calling Lidl Spain. [1]

[1]: https://musicbrainz.org/release/c9a6a6e5-4bb8-4738-a1d6-411f...

> which is why I export in mp3 as well as wav; wav for higher quality, and mp3 for labeling purposes; I could probably just use flac but compressed audio like mp3 also has the benefit of being less space intensive

You could replace the WAVs with FLACs and save a bunch of space on that account. Maybe enough that you realise you don't need to keep both lossless (WAV/FLAC) and lossy (MP3) copies around. Since FLAC is lossless, it will have the exact same audio quality as the WAV files they'll be sourced from. (And, as you mention, FLAC supports tags directly.)

If all you're using MP3 for is the space saving and metadata, you might like ogg/opus. It's the Opus codec (the state of the art in audio codecs right now) in an Ogg wrapper.

You'll find a portable player capable of handling vinyl before you find one that plays ogg/opus, but desktop software is mostly fine.

Not quite, you can install Rockbox on pretty much any portable player. It supports Opus and FLAC among many other formats.

https://www.rockbox.org/

VLC on Android supports opus. Unfortunately, most other players don't (I think this is a actually a bug in the Android media scanning library and not the players themselves though)

If an open source music format isn't a requirement for you, AAC is as efficient as Opus and playback support is universal – no version of iOS or Android has ever shipped without AAC decode support, for example.

Mp3tag also handles MP4/M4A files wonderfully.

AAC when well encoded sounds great, but there are too many sub-par encoder implementations that just don't sound good - sometimes worse than MP3.

If you're encoding AAC use either Apples encoder, or one of those from Fraunhofer:- Fhg-AAC available as a paid plug-in, or free with WinAMP, or the Open Source FDKAAC implementation originally for Android, but now available cross platform.

> …there are too many sub-par encoder implementations that just don't sound good - sometimes worse than MP3.

Whoa, I'd never imagined that could be the case and appreciate the heads-up. I've only had experience with the Apple and Fraunhofer encoders so far.

Mind calling out the offender(s)? This summer I'm releasing a best practices guide (and hopefully tools) to help podcasters move to AAC, and that would be useful to mention.

The FFMpeg wiki has some information, including calling out its own "vorbis" encoder as sub-par and not recommended (but apparently they also support a different "libvorbis" encoder that does not suffer from problems?) See https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio

Also for AAC in particular there are a few options https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC

One workaround is to put your Opus audio in either a webm or mka container.

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