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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Basically all services use it for realtime voice calls. And YouTube uses it for audio, among other formats.
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.
Since we're being sticklers in this thread, ogg is the container, and ogg is a pretty standard container for opus.
Checking Wikipedia: Ogg is the container and Vorbis/Speex are the codecs. Vorbis and Speex have been superseded by Opus.
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.
Had some users with Opus issues on Android Oreo, it's getting there, but not ideal if you're targeting a global audience.
[https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Opus#Music_en...]
In other words, there's nothing wrong with it.
(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.