21–30 of 44 posts
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.
Wow, nice seeing this here. Shine was a life saver when I was building the live broadcast capability of othernet.is. Our Satellite link was really low bitrate ( less than 20kbps). I wanted to keep as much of that as possible for the data-casting part, which was our core offering. So after experimenting with varioud codecs I narrowed down to using Opus@8kbps as my downlink from the satellite to our custom receivers. T…
That's interesting you were running at such a low bit-rate. In 1999 I was the 2nd employee at what became one of the world's biggest music streaming services. I was working from home as we didn't have offices yet, and my broadband got cut off because I hadn't been paid yet and I was broke. I ended up having to re-encode the entire music catalog at 8000bps so I could stream it all over my 9600bps cell connection via t…
Opus is simply magic. Iirc, they now even have a 6kbps mode.
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> Why do people insist on still using MP3, when better stuff is available? 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…
Note AAC-LC patents expired in 2017 (that's the one iTunes uses); HE-AAC should expire in 2024 (that's the one <128kbps streaming uses).
This flared up my nostalgia when I remembered ripping CDs I bought from Graywhale into .wav files and encoding them into mp3s on my windows 95 machine in the mid to late 90s. BladeEnc was amazing and fast. It would sometimes encode up to 1x! Meaning it only took about a minute to encode a 60 second .wav into an .mp3. Nowadays I can encode 32 10-minute wav files in like 2 seconds on my Ryzen 5950x.
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I remember times when it wasn’ts problem on much less than that… which is what most people had. Guess I’m just old :)
On x86, a Pentium 75 was just about the absolute minimum for playing the common 128 kbps stereo MP3s of the time. A DX4/100 could just barely do it if you were running a performant MS-DOS player and doing nothing else at the same time (the 486 of course had dramatically worse floating point performance than a Pentium clocked at the same frequency).
Did this originate on a ye-olde-worlde Acorn Archimedes, or merely get converted to run on that?
Anecdote - I remember the first jpeg renderer on the Arch, written in Basic, so interpreted, and it would take a couple of second to render a jpeg to screen on a 33Mhz CPU with no GPU acceleration.
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Can you elaborate? Who markets it and stands to gain from MP3's continued usage?
Well currently it would be royalties from licensing it out (the patent is expired so it's technically not needed anymore). There is also a benefit since consumers are more familiar with the word MP3 as opposed to AAC. However I think marketing in the past is much more relevant. I have heard of "MP3 players", but not "AAC" players.
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.
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That's interesting you were running at such a low bit-rate. In 1999 I was the 2nd employee at what became one of the world's biggest music streaming services. I was working from home as we didn't have offices yet, and my broadband got cut off because I hadn't been paid yet and I was broke. I ended up having to re-encode the entire music catalog at 8000bps so I could stream it all over my 9600bps cell connection via t…
What codec did you use for your 8000bps? In my experience opus is the only codec that can encode general audio to an "acceptable" (for low values of acceptable) quality at that bitrate. There are speech codecs that can go below 2kbps, but they are useless for non-speech audio (and are also very computationally expensive). Opus is simply magic. Iirc, they now even have a 6kbps mode.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On x86, a Pentium 75 was just about the absolute minimum for playing the common 128 kbps stereo MP3s of the time. A DX4/100 could just barely do it if you were running a performant MS-DOS player and doing nothing else at the same time (the 486 of course had dramatically worse floating point performance than a Pentium clocked at the same frequency).
My Pentium 166 MMX running Windows 95 and Winamp 0.x got 100% loaded while playing my first ever mp3 file - brought home on 3 floppy disks. That's why games of that era were using CD Audio for soundtrack or tracker music like Unreal or Deus Ex.
My old 233 MHz MMX Pentium machine could decode MPEG-4 standard definition video with an MP3 audio track, under Linux. Though I had to set my video player to real-time priority if I wanted it to not drop frames.