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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

It should try to use Flac / Opus, not mp3.

Flac/Opus may have benefits, but I think the Free Music Archive is optimizing for accessibility. Pretty much anybody can play an MP3 out of the box. I don't think one can say the same about Flac/Opus.

Can my web browser play FLAC or Opus out of the box? Mind, I'm not going to tell you what my web browser is. Because that's why they picked MP3: if you're using MP3 you can confidently say "yes" because it's a computer in 2018.

> Can my web browser play FLAC or Opus out of the box?

Flac isn't really for browser playback, but for lossless backup. Normal browsers should play Opus fine today. Some crippled ones might not, but for that there are projects like this as fallback:

https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

So I see no reason not to use Flac and Opus for music services.

You just said Flac is for lossless backup. Losslessback is not equal to the user experience.

Kind of selfish of you to think Flac should be a standard where some people wouldn't even know what it is.

People don't know what HTTP is.

What user experience? Any music archive or store can provide two functions: download for backup purposes (lossless codec is good for it), and on-line playback (for which lossy codec makes sense). Both can be called user experience and both have value.

People don't need to know what it is by default. But they should be able to make lossless backup if they need to.

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