Why do people insist on still using MP3, when better stuff is available? YouTube hasn't used MP3 for years, with good reason.
You can use Opus or AAC, even most car systems should work with one of them.
You can use Opus or AAC, even most car systems should work with one of them.
It's patent-free and well supported everywhere by everything.
For example, if you want to use audio on a webpage, and you want it to work *everywhere*, and you don't want to have to encode multiple formats/containers then MP3 is the only option. You can't use Opus because of course Safari (it does support it, but only in a Safari-specific container), and AAC is not support on Firefox in certain situations (because it doesn't actually include an AAC codec and relies on the OS to decode it).
First, most people here recognize that this is something from the past.
Second, some people work with older systems which do not support AAC due to patent reasons. This is not about libre software, just the fact that MP3 is easy to support because its patent fees (at the time anyway) are lower than AAC and the circuitry can be placed for tenth of a US cent (which Opus don't have advantage of). There are new standalone players (built into speakers or radios) out there which don't support AAC purely because of patent fees (MP3 no longer have active patents). This makes MP3 a lowest-common denominator of compatibility.
TLDR: for Youtube, transit bw is expensive and rapidly evolving codec cornucopia is cheap enough to cover with the bw savings.
This code was dug out from the dusty crates of those times before internet and github. It apparently was created by Gabriel Bouvigne sometime around the end of the 20th century.
Or did you mean native playback from sd cards/usb sticks?
Because the latter are called "MP4 players" and the files are meant to have ".m4a" extension. Also because dedicated media player devices stopped being something ordinary people need (because smartphones) sooner than MP4 became a thing.