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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

That's a nice package. I use some of the components on the command line to get my CD data to the music server.

Extract data to wav:

    cdparanoia -B

Compress all wavs to mp3 (in parallel, takes like 1 second, crazy!):

    parallel lame --preset extreme {} -o {.}.mp3 ::: *.wav

Clean up folder

    rm *.wav

Import into mopidy library and lookup/apply metadata with beets

    beet import .
    sudo su - mopidy -s /bin/bash -c 'mopidy --config /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf local scan'

(I actually have a bash script for that, obviously)

Done. Next step is to go into Mopidy-Iris UI and hit play and it plays all around the house thanks to snapcast. Garsh darn glorious.

https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

https://mjaggard.github.io/snapcast/

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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Why MP3? It's simply not a great codec to target. If you have a music server, then why not flac? If space is an issue, then why not Opus (which almost everything supports now) or HE-AAC which has nearly as much support as MP3. You can target the same MP3 bitrate and end up with a more transparent encoding. You can decrease the bitrate and have the same quality as your mp3 encode with a smaller bitrate.

I honestly don't understand why mp3 is such a sticky codec. It's long been surpassed by others.

Well, I've done a number of ABX listening tests (apt install abx) and to my chagrin simply could not tell the difference.

I challenge everyone who feels strongly about this to actually bust out abx and do some listening tests comparing flac to LAME-encoded extreme MP3s and prove to yourself that flac matters at all on your equipment. And then share your results with us if you want!

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/abx.1.html#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test

But yeah I should put the command to encode to flac there for people who prefer it!

The commenter suggested not only FLAC but also Opus, which is a lossy codec that compresses better than MP3. So you could save some disk space.

But generally I agree with you, if you're happy with how your setup works and sounds, MP3 is no great sin.

As for what the commenter said, firstly, MP3 was synonymous with digital music in most of our minds for so long; second, even if modern equipment handles all the better codecs, a lot of us still have memories of times it didn't in the past. Third, I think some of the tooling around metadata is not as developed or ubiquitous for, say, an ogg container. There are ogg comments, but ID3 is better supported.

> MP3 was synonymous with digital music in most of our minds for so long

I think this is probably the main reason for mp3's stickiness.

> second, even if modern equipment handles all the better codecs, a lot of us still have memories of times it didn't in the past.

Sure, and your dvd players didn't always handle x264. Things change :). It's been probably 10 years since new audio hardware had trouble with non-mp3 media.

> Third, I think some of the tooling around metadata is not as developed or ubiquitous for, say, an ogg container. There are ogg comments, but ID3 is better supported.

Granted, I think ogg will have worse support for equipment. However, I'd expect that aac in m4a will end up with the same level of support as mp3s do today simply because it's a lot more common than opus (and older).

> MP3 is no great sin.

It's not, I just don't like seeing generally superior tech getting sidelined because the inferior tech is more familiar. Perhaps that's a sin on my part :). I admit it probably doesn't ultimately matter if your music is 1MB vs 2MB.

I've written code to parse metadata out of an M4A. I'm sure Apple does a good job of it given they've done that in iTunes for 20+ years, but it's a lot less documented and straightforward than ID3v2, as imperfect and hacky as that format is. As a result, I can pretty trivially edit ID3 from a shell script, but dealing with M4A metadata still feels like a black box.

(After typing that, I realize that calling it a "black box" is a pretty good pun on MP4 box formats..)

My car's radio supports both MP3 and AAC-in-MPEG4, but with the latter it occasionally has trouble reading the metadata, though I haven't really figured out why exactly that might be.

I don't disagree that given a high enough bitrate, MP3 will become transparent. More my point was why not use a more efficient codec (like opus) if you are trying to save bits (128kbps is transparent for stereo music vs the 200+kbps for lame extreme).

If you aren't trying to save bits, then why use a lossy codec at all?

That's more my point. MP3s will be smaller than flac, for sure, but opus or he-aac files can be even smaller (half the size or more).

Ah yes all that's a fair point. I guess I just am stuck in the old LAME is best mentality of the olden days. I will look into opus. Thanks.

The dinamics of mp3 is much lower.

It depends on what audio setup you do the listening. On laptop speakeakers it will be no difference.

I did an abx test on reasonable caliber headphones. Try it! It surprised me.

"Why MP3? It's simply not a great codec to target. If you have a music server, then why not flac?"

I still encode to plain old 128k mp3. Here's why ...

First, I keep the WAV originals and those are what I listen to on my music system, in my music server, etc.

Second, if I am using the mp3s it is because I am going to some unknown place to interface with some unknown tool to play these - let's just make life simple and use something that will work everywhere - even the dumb creative audio bluetooth adapter that was in that airbnb that one time ...

Finally, 128k mp3 is typically a 10:1 compression ratio and makes size and space "budgeting" easy. It's easy to remember.

One other thing:

When I export my ripped CD wav collection to mp3 I also compress the filenames - I flatten to ASCII 256 and truncate the filenames to 64 characters, etc. LOTS of car audio interfaces just puke when they hit weird unicode characters or can't display long filenames ... it creates all manner of havoc.

I'm really sorry for dogpiling on your setup here, but why keep wav files rather than flac? Flac files are lossless compression, so you can always get the exact same wav out of them, they take less disk space and they can hold Metadata. Flac support is also really common these days.

The only argument I’ve heard that makes me go “OK, fine!” in favor of FLAC is that they forced a standardization of metadata.

FLAC is well-supported. But, PCM RIFF WAV files are triv-i-al. Any CS101 student can write a parser. They don’t need decoding.

2:1 lossless compression is nice. It’s quite a technical feat.

Meanwhile, as an old software engineer, I focus pretty hard on technical simplicity. And, the complexity ratio of PCM vs. pretty much else everything is a a very, very small number. Very small :p

If enough time or technology has passed that someone has to write a wav parser, how do you expect them to mount your file system, assuming it has survived?

But the whole point of software like whipper or EAC is that they crosscheck your rips with an online DB of rips (and you know, when your rip's checksum match, that it's 100% correct because there's no way you and x other people would have read the same wrong rip, misreading the exact same errors).

As I understand it cdparanoia does not such check. It's "paranoid" by its own but you're not verifying that your rip is 100% perfect.

But then if you then convert it to mp3 and discard the lossless files anyway, I take it you don't care much about data integrity.

whipper and EAC do serve another purpose than cdparanoia (I think, btw, that whipper is something uses cdparanoia under the hood) and I'm pretty sure that people who do care about bitperfect rips do not then go and convert their files to mp3s.

FWIW a .flac file (now a .wav but a .flac: that is lossless and compressed) is about twice the size of a 320 kbps mp3 I think.

Seen that songs are tinier than tiny files compared to modern standards I'm totally fine playing the .flac files I ripped using whipper.

It's both my audio "source" and my backups.

Ok that's a good argument. I downloaded whipper and tried it out on a few CDs. So far so good. Flac and exact copies, here I come!

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