My troubles with MP3s | Hacker News Reader

My troubles with MP3s

disquiet.com

45 pointsjanvdberg67 comments

I think, when purchasing and listening to purchased music[0], there is an action involved that prepares you for the (passive or active) act of listening. For some people, that action is moving to a library of media, selecting the disc (or tape), and starting it playing. For others, that action is starting an audio program, selecting the album[1], and starting it playing. I think both groups of people are doing the same thing: They are putting them into their proper mental state to experience the music. But, like many things, the way in which they go about that preparation will differ from person to person.

[0]: Note that I am referring both to people who purchase music in a physical form (such as CDs) and those who purchase music in DRM-free digital form (for example, from Bandcamp or the iTunes Store). I do not include listens from streaming services (for example, Apple Music and YouTube).

[1]: I'm specially limiting this to albums so as to make a more direct comparison with people listening to purchased music that comes in a physical form. Of course there are playlists on the digital side, and mixtapes (& equivalent CDs) on the physical side. It would be interesting to explore if this—selecting and playing a playlist/mixtape—gives the same feeling as selecting and playing a specific disc/album.

I used to have my entire music collection in iTunes (ripped from CDs and purchased from Apple's store). After reaching my limit of frustration with iTunes, I decided that I would put my collection in the cloud and manage it myself. I wrote a python front-end that used OpenStack Swift (object storage) for the cloud storage. I set up plugins for the cloud storage layer so that I can also use S3 or Azure. I hosted Swift in a Digital Ocean droplet for many years. I recently shut down my Swift server and moved my collection to Wasabi (S3 compatible). I use Cyberduck to upload new content. My catalog (metadata) is stored in a SQLite file that is also stored in the cloud.

I nearly always listen to my music on random/shuffle play. It's all command-line oriented. I have a script to toggle play/pause and another to advance to the next song. I have playlist support, but hardly ever use it. It's not a perfect system, but it meets my needs and I'm generally quite happy with it.

On MacOS, songs are played using Apple's built-in 'afplay' executable. On Windows, songs are played using 'MPC-HC'.

Please don't use "MP3s" to refer to any audio file. It's not correct when old people do it, and it's not correct here either.

Adding to this a secondary public service announcement:

I recently learned of Opus (audio codec) and it's amazing. If you've been using mp3, ogg, speex, aac, or any other lossy format: time to upgrade. Opus is freely licensed and I'm blown away by the quality per bitrate. Released in 2012 and I don't see anyone using it yet! Device support is good nowadays and you can either have smaller files or better quality in the same amount of space.

Last night I re-encoded a lot of my audio books (they were mainly mono mp3 64kbps with a few exceptions) and it takes like half the space. One of the larger books went from 1.5GB to 350MB and I can't tell the difference in quality at all.

What I used is apt install opus-tools && opusenc --bitrate x --framesize 60 in.flac out.opus; or choose the Opus export format in Audacity if you're more GUI-inclined.

Just go lossless. A huge music collection now is, what, 300-500GB in FLAC? That's on the order of 1500-2000 albums, if I've done my orders of magnitude right (about 300MB/album in FLAC).

I re-ripped my CD collection a few years back, and after pondering formats, I realized that for listening around the property, FLAC is perfect (Plex handles it, PlexAmp is nice). And if I really want to stuff more stuff on a smaller drive for the car or something, I can transcode down from FLAC and still have the lossless originals.

It's the same reason my DVD rips from our collection are just MakeMKV wrapping of the original MPEG2. Yeah, I could save some space by transcoding... but disk is cheap, and it's just not worth the hassle. Rip to lossless and go from there.

Depends what you're playing from. I don't have a terabyte of storage on my phone and I'd like to store more than just audio books and music. If you've got a desktop with magnetic storage then sure.

I'd also be curious if you can tell the difference between a 128 kbps Opus and a lossless flac file (in a blind test of course, easy way to test yourself: cp a.flac $RANDOM.flac; cp a.opus $RANDOM.opus; play both with cvlc or something, make your guess, then look at the file size to get the result, repeat at least five times). I could see the argument for having a lossless copy somewhere, just in case you get better audio playback equipment in the future, but for a hot copy (especially on a mobile device) I'm not sure flac is beneficial.

I agree. I was using almost entirely lossless until five years ago or so, when I did some ABX tests (there's a good foobar plugin for those interested) and realised that 256+ kbps LAME was indistinguishable from lossless 24/96 to my ears -- even when actively comparing the two in a quiet room, which obviously is very different to just listening casually while commuting etc.

I kept the lossless files for archival purposes but everything on my phone/laptop is ~320 LAME VBR.

That said, soon after that I switched to Spotify and only rarely listen to my own files now. The convenience and ability to discover new music just doesn't compare.

I suspect that 192k vorbis and 128k opus would also be transparent for you as well (unless you listen to techno/industrial and have really good speakers). Might save you a bit of space.

Yeah that's likely true. I had chosen MP3 for reasons of total compatability and 'good enough' compression, but it seems like almost all music players have good support for those formats as well. Maybe at some point I'll switch over.

MP3 also has some fundamental problems when dealing with short sharp sounds (e.g. castanets), which have been fixed in subsequent audio codec generations such as AAC, Vorbis or Opus.

This also applies to other hardware. Even if you had a terabyte on your phone, no point to lossless if you proceed to play it with cheap earplugs. Not sure if audio controllers in phones are a big influence nowadays.

I use lossless because why not. I have plenty of space on my computer. And if I really like an album that would like to listen on the go, I transcode it to a lossy version (aac)

> I don't see anyone using it yet

Basically all services use it for realtime voice calls. And YouTube uses it for audio, among other formats.

It's used under the hood indeed, but among hackers (let alone an average person) it's barely known.

Until two days ago, I had heard of the term and knew it was some music format, or perhaps speech encoding, but I had no idea if it was a legacy 90s format or what.

Hence the PSA because I'm blown away by the quality difference (for speech at least, I haven't tried music but Wikipedia says that blind tests also showed better bitrate:quality ratios for music). I've always been using mp3 at ~160 for music and 64kbps for speech (or sometimes AMR in the past) but those days are over now. AAC already should have made me upgrade, but the support is less good (e.g. Android has some lag issues with certain AAC files). Opus works perfectly fine everywhere so far, does great compression on both speech and music, so now I have zero reason to ever go with anything other than MP3 anymore.

For everyone in streaming side except for Apple everyone got the memo. (Outside of iOS), most non-Apple streaming services uses Opus if it's sensible (Dolby for surround sounds because patents and FLAC for lossless audio).

> ogg

Since we're being sticklers in this thread, ogg is the container, and ogg is a pretty standard container for opus.

Oh, thanks, that's a misunderstanding on my part.

Checking Wikipedia: Ogg is the container and Vorbis/Speex are the codecs. Vorbis and Speex have been superseded by Opus.

Can't upgrade before macOS and iOS get proper Opus support. Technically there is Opus support, but not to a degree where you'd actually want to start using it.

Since we're at the PSAs, here is one about Opus: The codec is fixed at a 48kHz sample rate. For your audiobooks that were already low quality it probably doesn't make a difference that there's now one more processing step applied to the audio, but I would never choose Opus as an archival format for music, as there is a lot of content using different sample rates (CDs in particular are 44.1kHz, so there's always a resampling step involved when converting them to Opus). Storage is cheap these days, so for serious archiving FLAC is the only logical choice (but obviously not when the original material was a 64kbps MP3 of course).

In theory, the resampling shouldn't matter, though, should it?

As per Nyquist, as long as the sampling rate is higher than double the highest frequency you care about, the original signal can always be perfectly reconstructed. Therefore going to a higher sample rate shouldn't affect the originally recorded content.

While the "perfect" reconstruction per Nyquist does indeed assume things that aren't actually possible in reality, like infinitely steep filters, AFAIK the best approximations we have are still good enough to not cause any audible issues (all the more so if you're subsequently applying lossy compression anyway), though of course it might be possible that a particular encoder uses a faulty implementation that does indeed mess things up.

Yes, perfect filters don't exist, that's one issue. The other issue is that using Opus now forces you to use that one filter the encoder chose to use. As weird as it may seem, there are various reasons for preferring a lower-quality filters if your source input signal has a low sample rate to begin with (the result may sound fresher due to non-perfect filtering, which can be preferable in some situations). With Opus, the decoder would first have to downsample the 48kHz to the original sample rate, only to upsample them again with a lower-quality filter to achieve the same thing. I think avoiding all those extra steps has its advantage.

The current public test builds of Clone Hero, a fan-made Guitar Hero/Rock Band style game, support Opus audio alongside the legacy formats.

> Device support is good nowadays

Had some users with Opus issues on Android Oreo, it's getting there, but not ideal if you're targeting a global audience.

Opus is especially space-saving at lower bitrates (as you've discovered). At higher rates the difference is less spectacular, but for non-critical/casual listening (what many of us do most of the time), the space savings (for thousands of files) can be substantial.

[https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Opus#Music_en...]

It's akin to calling a Value Village or other donation store "goodwill". Goodwill went out of business in my province years ago, but my mother still has a goodwill pile (stuff to be donated), even though she'll bring it to Value Village, Salvation Army, or Talize.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with it.

For what it's worth, the title did confuse me. What the author seems to mean is audio files as opposed to physical media, not the MP3 format in any specific way. I thought it would be a technical discussion of the MP3 format when I clicked the thread. Your example seems much harder to misunderstand in typical contexts so I'm not sure the comparison really works.

(Then to add to the confusion, the article starts with: ``by “MP3s” I mean any fixed digital documents of audio. So, by “MP3s,” I also mean WAV files, and FLAC, and ALAC, etc. Actually, I specifically don’t mean WAV`` err so what's it gonna be...)

Of course, I do see your point in general. It's like cryptography vs. cryptocurrency (crypto=?) or some people objecting to the media's use of the word "hacker" to mean "criminal as applied to the digital domain". Those battles are lost and that's just how the language evolved: everyone knows that crypto in an investment context doesn't refer to public key encryption and that hackers on the news don't mean painters (reference: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html). But for MP3s, in this particular case, I think the author caused more confusion than clarity.

This goodwill?: https://www.goodwill.org/

Yes.

What makes you think that "old people" are more prone to this?

The author specifically points out that he's using it as a shorthand.

I love Mp3s for everything except masters of my own music. For that I render everything to WAV. For everyone else's music WAV is fine because I don't need to master it or upload it to spotify.

The primary problem with keeping my own audio library is that modern music player makers often mess with me. They hobble their free apps, screwing up basic functionality (like the music skip buttons, playlist and UI controls, and random play modes).. features that have been around working just fine since CDs were invented just to encourage me to purchase a copy of their (supposedly) normally functioning app, which probably is a rebranded fork of winamp with no real changes, for 10$. Seeing as I can't trust them because they play around with ruining standard functionality of a music player app, many of them have deleted songs from my library over time (ehem... Google Play Music) Luckily I keep backups elsewhere in 2 other places. Phone makers getting rid of headphone jacks also wasn't enough to make me quit using Mp3s, so not much else will stop me... Let's not bad mouth them and give greedy corps ideas. If we only have spotify, then frankly music will be terrible, and bots will play commercials before every song by 2025, and I don't want to live in a world where I don't pick my own music.

I don't trust app makers anymore since artificial malfunctions have been introduced to encourage upgrades.. But I'll stick with Mp3s thank you, because they play in more devices and if worst comes to worse, I'll just charge my iPod and move to the mountains where there is no wifi.

> I don't trust app makers anymore since artificial malfunctions have been introduced to encourage upgrades I don't have any examples on-hand besides maybe WinAmp, but please don't give up. There are plenty of devs (especially in the hobbies space) that make great, paid apps that kick ass.

EDIT: have you tried PlexAmp?

I’ve tried Doppler which is nice if you don’t overly tinker with your library but I bought Swinsian to play locally and I also have Plex on a mac mini I use as a server (for playing on my ATV, my work computer and my iPad)

My mp3 days are over I think. I did move to them exclusively for most of a decade, as I ripped my entire CD collection over a several week period about 18 years ago, and then used that. I went through various software players - Winamp and Xmms for a while, Quod Libet later. Various hardware players too, an Archos, car stereos, Sonos kit, various phones.

But now the collection lives on a file server and is rarely ever touched, I don't even bother putting it on newer phones because I have spotify.

I have recently thought that I miss the careful-curation aspect of things. A collection used to be yours and yours alone, having access to certain music was somehow special and meaningful. But that was a side-effect of scarcity and the physical nature of music; money was limited and each album was a chunk of cash.

Now I can listen to anything, whenever. My experience is different... but I don't think it's worse. I can listen to anything I can think of.

Not all music in the world is on Spotify. Great that it's working for you, though.

Pretty much everything I can think of is there now. There used to be a number of gaps in some of the more obscure areas of my collection (largely 90s British goth bands), but it's more or less all there now.

My main gripe about MP3s isn't the format itself but the inevitable huge difference in recording and mastering levels plus dynamics when converting old and new material for use on the same device such as for example portable media players. I've partially solved this by re-encoding everything that I put in there (1) using a macro on Audacity (suggestions on different tools welcome), however it sometimes crashes on some files, no reasons given why, and the result isn't what I would require anyway. All other methods (replaygain) fail or don't fully work. The problem is due to the difference in level and dynamics: older material is either slightly compressed (analog master, vinyl or tape rip, etc.) or less compressed (digital remaster, CD rip) but still and very low in average sound level; newer material however is being over compressed to make it sound louder (search for "loudness war"), therefore to reduce all music on the same player to similar levels a tool should operate on dynamics first, taking account of the different ratios of the material being given, then once the dynamics has been normalized, it brings the volume to the same level. As far as I know, there's nothing out there that does anything similar.

(1) Yes, I know re-encoding is THE bad thing, but that material isn't going to leave that device.

> suggestions on different tools welcome

"Can You Losslessly Increase the Volume of MP3 Files?"

https://www.howtogeek.com/280739/can-you-losslessly-increase...

Thanks, I already used Replaygain. It's better than nothing, but it doesn't solve the difference in dynamics among old and new material which affect our sound level perception. An old recording is often less compressed than a new one, therefore it has many higher and lower peaks, so by simply raising its level we could get to a point in which some of its peaks are higher than the new song, for example triggering the red leds on a vu-meter, but the average level is lower so that we still hear the other recording as louder. It's the average level that matters, that is, dynamics, and sadly there's no way to modify it without re encoding.

VLC can apply a compressor and other effects at playback time, but that may over-compress the newer recordings that already are loudness-maximized, depending on the settings.

Songs that are in MP3 format do not have studio quality sound. That MP3 format compresses them, makes songs sound artificially louder, and you lose some sounds from the studio quality version. You get the fullest sound experience when listening to lossless music from studio quality songs, not MP3. People usually listen to songs with the MP3 file format because that is cheaper and doesn't hog up much personal storage space in their devices. Not because they are wanting the full sound experience when listening to songs with lossless studio quality music. It is easier to download pirated MP3 songs rather than lossless music with FLAC, ALAC, or APE file formats for example.

Personally, I prefer lossless music with the fullest sound experience without that compression and artificial loudness my hypersensitive ears can detect. But I listen to lossy music when there are no other options. Because I know there are license agreements where some singers or musicians will only publicly release lossy music for legal reasons. Because I found a soundtrack album with exclusive songs exclusively on iTunes that were only lossy for example. Otherwise, I prefer losslessly digital music rather than C.D's, vinyls, cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, etc. that can distort the sound of songs from physical damage or dust. Because I would rather losslessly rip music from a C.D, vinyl, cassette tape, 8-track tape, etc. and put that onto my microSD card than deal with future distortion of sound or song skipping.

> That MP3 format compresses them, makes songs sound artificially louder, and you lose some sounds from the studio quality version.

Erm, I think you're confusing audio compression in the sense of reducing storage space requirements, and audio compression in the sense of reducing the dynamic range of the audio to make it e.g. appear sounding louder. MP3 (and other lossy audio codes) are about the former, and have absolutely nothing to do with the latter.

And while there are some merits to just using lossless compression these days if you're not storage space-constrained (certainly still not true for my phone, though), in blind tests people have been mostly unable to reliably distinguish between lossless and high-bitrate lossy music, all the more so with newer codecs than MP3, like AAC or Opus. (MP3 has some fundamental problems when dealing with short sharp sounds for example, which cannot be fixed by simply throwing more bitrate at it.)

I can't recommend https://beets.io/ strongly enough for managing your library.

It's nice to have a single source of truth for tags and all in the same format.

Only downside is you will need a player app that supports album-artist tags; notably this disqualifies all gnome players, as the gnome library for managing metadata does not support album-artist(!!). I use cmus on linux and GoneMad on Android.

[edit]

Nepomuk (the gnome ontology) seems to have an albumArtist field[1], not sure why gnome-music doesn't seem to bring that out.

1: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/tracker/docs/developer/...

What's stopping them to just burn the files into audio CDs and get the same physical features?

I think overall there's a big opportunity in bringing non-computer interfaces to digital experiences. I just interact with a screen too fucking much. I don't

I love having a Google Home where I can say "Play the Beatles' Maxwell's Silver Hammer" but there are too many ways to go wrong. If it plays Maxwell's Silver Hammer then it plays some random crap afterwards. If I say the "Blue Album" it doesn't know what that is. But it's an improvement.

Maybe a binder that recognizes hand gestures would be cool. IT has all of my music and if I touch an album it plays that album, I can flick songs into a queue or something like that.

I just use MusicBee (on Wine/Linux) and always download purchases to the same directory which is watched by a script. Whenever I download a .zip, it extracts them, does album mp3 gain and opens a visual id3 tag editor (I just quickly scan through the tags - 7digital are fuckers for messing with album names, release dates etc). Once that's done I open MusicBee and it imports the tracks, moving them to the "correct" location based on metadata. I have a daily backup job to a NAS, and a weekly to a cheap cloud service (so I can undo any bad changes that I did to my files for up to a week)

I have a script that chooses the next track to play in a directory.

It does more than just shuffling, because if I skip a track before it has ended, its rating will decrease depending on how quickly I skip it. The next track to be played is determined by its rating and how frequently it has been played (it is valued more if it has been played less).

I don't get distracted by words/artwork etc., nor do I have a player that gets in my way. I just have some shortcuts to pause, show track info (in case I want to share it) etc.

Apple Music does a fine job even if you don’t subscribe

I'd dispute this a bit. Apple Music has become horrible at doing the job of organizing Music. Even with the rules you can set in smart playlists, it has become harder and harder to organize music. It just doesn't seem to be Apple's priority. I actually miss earlier versions of iTunes which says quite a lot about the current offering.

I have Spotify but I keep a decent sized collection of MP3s on my phone. Shuffling through it is a fine way to enjoy my library.

I have a superb collection of MP3s on my phone, but Google in their wisdom decided to erase Play Music. Of course there are no shortage of players for Android, but I've fallen victim to the paralysis of choice; Play Music was perfect, and I don't know which of the available players is closest to it. So my MP3s have been inaccessible for over a year.

It depends what features you're looking for, but I've found VLC (available on F-Droid) to be one of the nicer ones. It does video playing also and has gestures like skipping forwards and backwards, so I'd have it installed anyway, and so I configured it to also scan my music folder. Mostly I just go into all songs and play on shuffle but you can also select by artist and stuff.

VLC's killer feature, for me, is "this folder is full of music files. Play them in order." It seems most other music apps heavily prioritize artist and album search, which is great if you listen to mainstream music and not so great if you listen to a lot of soundtracks, or have poorly tagged collections of music ripped from goodness knows where. VLC lets me organize my files as actual files, and gets on with playing those files rather than getting in my way. 10/10.

I second the sibling comment.

Try VLC. That's what I settled on also.

It's simple and just works.

I ended up using Pulsar music player, only because we were camping and a friend send me the apk via bluetooth (I was a spotify person before I started heavily going out).

It simply worked for my old folderwise-kept mp3s etc, and it also displays embedded lyrics in the mp3 files which was a killer feature.

It's not that I love this app dearly, it's just that it got the job done and didn't need replacement.

I got an Android DAP for Christmas last year and found that I really like musicolet: https://krosbits.in/musicolet/

It works really well. It has the playlisting/queueing metaphors that I prefer and it has a decent interface for finding things or even playing all of the albums from a specific artist.

I use the default Samsung Music app. It integrates nicely with Edge Panels on Samsung phones.

> Google in their wisdom decided to erase Play Music

This was the final straw for me.

As a developer who needed access to both, for years I ran Apple and Android side by side. Sometimes I'd switch the SIM over literally weekly depending upon mood (the danger of account loss in both cases is so high that nothing I do beyond app purchases is ever tied to or held against my Apple or Google account as that means placing all my digital stuff at the whim of huge corporations with no practical customer service).

I have MP3s. Curated and organised. The world of tech is heading for rental of everything possible (and the time will come when it is unaffordable with so many subscriptions) so I see no reason to abandon what I already own in order to pay for it again every month forever.

Then Google removed Play Music (and hence the online library). I know there are alternatives, but there was no need to destroy localised music on the phone. It was a totally cynical means of creating new subscriptions for YouTube Music by leveraging the Android platform. Very much not good and probably mono/duopolistic legally speaking.

So now I'm iPhone only. Not out of love for Apple (I used both side by side for years), and not out of naivety, but because daily the forced choice of the lesser evil drives Google ever further from consideration. By targeting my audio it hit me where it hurt, and there's a price to pay for that.

Despite death by a thousand cuts, in the end each of us has a red line somewhere; the pure, greedy, duopolistic, arrogant cynicism of the death of Google Play was one such for me.

> Google in their wisdom decided to erase Play Music

I felt that pain. I would be interested in something self hosted that looked and felt similar to Play Music, but I have yet to find one.

Edit: Then I scrolled down a bit more and saw someone linked to Navidrome. It might suffice for me. https://www.navidrome.org/

Years ago I discovered a workflow, that worked out pretty good so far:

1.) Store your whole existing MP3s to another place (external HDD) and put it AWAY (remove it from your harddrive)

2.) Get familiar with beets[1] and its configuration

3.) Think of 1 to 10 "albums" you like to listen to at the moment

4.) Copy these from your external HDD or if you down't own it get the CD and rip it with EAC[5], then import them into the fresh beets library

5.) Everytime you want to hear a track or a song, that does not exist in your beets library, repeat step 4 (this might sound like much work and pain, but it will pay off later, trust me)

6.) If you would like to have self hosted "cloud access" to you music, use navidrome [2] or alternatives supporting subsonic protocols together with according apps (I use substreamer[3])

7.) If you would like to go offline, get an iPod classic 160GB with an iflash quad[4] or a good old iPod Nano 7th Gen (if you need bluetooth)

Notes:

- IMPORTANT: Do not import music, you do not want to listen to, this keeps the library small

- Import full albums, not single tracks - much better support for metadata, most albums are found on musicbrainz.org

- If you have an album, that is not on musicbrainz.org, create an account and add it there instead of tagging it manually (the community rulez!)

- Try to find "Best Of" albums of your favorite bands to prevent importing to many albums for 1 single track

- Use beets[1] to convert your audio files into 192kbps mp3s for compatibility reasons, but keep the original CDs or use FLAC to store them to your external drive - you might as well use a "better" codec that is supported by all your devices

Result: A small (but everytime growing), well organized, self syncing, non restricted music library that can be listened to mobile, but also supporting Podcasts and audio books... Fits well in my pocket ;)

[1] https://beets.io/

[2] https://www.navidrome.org/

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ghenry22.s... (android),

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/substreamer/id1012991665 (ios)

[4] https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-quad/

[5] https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Thank you for the well thought and we'll explained procedure, I will give it a spin

My 12-year-old car plays MP3s via USB port, and that has worked excellent.

People don't realize that part of the value of Spotify is providing cataloging and search for you.

TLDR; they don’t care about MP3s as a format or the effects of compression - to the extent they’ve conflated all formats, including lossless ones.

They’re complaining about the fact that files aren’t physical objects, and they end with a claim that music as a file has no value, presumably vs physical media.

Honestly just comes across to me as a new version of vinyl vs cd vs compressed formats nonsense.

Is there an XBMC for MP3s?

> XBMC is a popular open-source multimedia center

Is that what you mean? Does this software not play MP3 files? I'm confused.

foobar2000 is quite nice

Like subsonic?

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