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Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? (hackaday.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I do. I have a gigantic collection of rare track rips in MP3 / 128 kbps, both downloaded from the days of Napster / Emule / eDonkey, ripped from CDs and cassettes or from recordings I made in raves.

Since then, I moved across 7 countries and I lost all that physical media in the moves - when I didn't ditch them on purpose to travel light.

All I have left is my collection of low-fidelity MP3s. I still listen to them all the time. They're not always that great, being what they are, so any MP3 player that improves their playback somehow is a win for me.

[–] Cort 4 points 1 day ago

Oof, I made the mistake of down converting to 96kbps to save HDD room way back in the day. They sound awful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I never compromised on quality - 128 kbps for me baby! Hard-drive usage be damned.

Of course, now I know it's not great quality. But here's the thing: I'm old enough that I can't tell the difference anymore. So 30 years later, my 128 kpbs MP3s still sound perfectly fine to me 🙂

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

100% agreed. I lost 2 (full) 96-disc case logic books many, many years ago. If I hadn't ripped every one of them I'd be without thousands of songs. Plus all those rare one-offs (like you said).

My id3 tags are shit, but I have multiple backups of everything.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Not to mention, even if you still had those CDs, they'd probably be dead by now.

Here's the little story of my most precious MP3s:

Back in the 70s when I was a kid, I used to go to my grandparents' house fairly regularly. I loved my grandpa and I used to spend hours with him. And he loved me too. So much so that he usually left a small cassette tape recorder going on his desk while we spent quality time together in his office.

He made hundreds of tapes containing nothing else but the sound of our voices while we were together, and sometimes my grandmother's who would pop in the office to check on us from time to time. Hundreds of hours of ordinary life with my grandpa that he used to play back for his own enjoyment when he was alone.

I found the tapes in his attic after he died in 1995. Turns out, I had one of the very first CD burners on the market at that time - a huge, phenomenally expensive, VCR-sized SCSI 1x burner affair - and I also had a pretty solid PC for its time, all bought by black market money I made as a student on the new cellphone craze. I digitized all the tapes as WAV files, kept the best bits, made them into CD tracks and burned 2 audio CDs, one for my mom and one for me. I stored the tapes somewhere but I lost them. Probably in a move again.

Years later, I tried to play my CD. Sure enough, it didn't play. I asked my mom to lend me hers, and... it didn't play either. The tapes were gone, the CDs were gone... my grandpa was gone.

I had nothing to lose, so I tried reading both CDs using all the CDROM drives I had lying around. One finally managed to perilously latch on to something vaguely readable on my CD - skipping and grinding and pulling byte after byte very slowly. I left it running for 2 days and it finally managed to extract all the audio unscathed. The CD came back out totally scratched up and the CDROM drive never worked again, but I had saved the memory of my grandfather's voice.

I encoded the audio tracks as 128 kpbs MP3s, and that's my most precious set of MP3s: the voice of my grandfather talking to me from half a century ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Ouch, that's my heartstrings you're pulling at!

[–] bitchkat 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I have cds from the 80's that play just fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I had quite a few commercial music CDs that started "rotting" from the edge after a few years. I looked it up back then and apparently it was poorly-pressed CDs that let humidity creep in-between the two plastic disks and oxidize the aluminum coating inside. Cheap CDs I guess.

[–] bitchkat 1 points 1 day ago

Terrible. I reripped my collection to flac a couple of years ago. All 700 or so had no issues except for a couple that had sustained damage from an idiot (me).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Some of my CDs are from the 80's and they still play fine. Pressed discs are much more reliable than burned discs.
The early CD-Rs were particularly unreliable. The burners were not great back then either.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Eh, they're fine for when you want files that people can recognize, and aren't huge.

You pass someone a bunch of flac, they don't knot what it is and you waste time explaining it. You pass them mp3s, they happily go on their way.

That's the only real reason to use it since there's better options, and any player can play them nowadays. Might still be useful for older cd players that also handle mp3, but that's the only format they handle.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

This article reads like it was written a long time ago.

The open formats they listed are widely supported by most common devices. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I’m a snobby Flac’r

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

There are much better open source codecs available now. Unfortunately, MP3 is lossy, so you can't convert it to any other format without degrading the quality. That means it will stick around for a long time since many people have large MP3 collections.