Technology

Apart from my home hifi (which is built around flac) everything i liaten to ia mp3. Podcasts - mp3. Car audio system? Max 192kbps mp3. My phone? Full of mp3. And I'm sure I'm not alone. To say mp3 is not relevant anymore is just misguided.

Funnily enough the guy who invented MP3 earned enough from royalties to barely afford a regular house in Germany. Meanwhile Apple made billions and rose like a phoenix from the ashes thanks to Apple Music and the iPod that rely on this format.

Considering most music files are MP3, yes it's still cared about. It's easy and small.

You don't need lossless all the time.

Opus is better than MP3 in every way. File size is either better or the same, and audio is better even at lower bitrates. But realistically, most streaming services don't provide HD audio, so it really doesn't even matter.

249 webm  audio only      2 │    1.58MiB  49k https │ audio only         opus        49k 48k low, webm_dash
250 webm  audio only      2 │    2.09MiB  65k https │ audio only         opus        65k 48k low, webm_dash
251 webm  audio only      2 │    4.14MiB 128k https │ audio only         opus       128k 48k medium, webm_dash
233 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
234 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
140 m4a   audio only      2 │    4.20MiB 130k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.2  130k 44k medium, m4a_dash

This is YouTube music, which generally serves the split audio from a YouTube video as a song. Most of them I checked either don't have audio above 130Kbps or don't even provide MP3/Opus anyways.

I still prefer mp3 because it's small and doesn't sound any different to me than uncompressed formats, so why waste the disk space? 🤷🏻‍♂️

The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats.

I remember someone saying that and me having a hard time believing it, but I've seen several people say that.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1dkeiwz/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_computers/

The OS interfaces have followed this trend, by developing OS that are more similar to a smartphone design (Windows 8 was the first great example of this). And everything became more user-friendly (my 65+ yo parents barely know how to turn on a computer, but now, use apps for the bank and send emails from their phone). The combined result is that the younger generations have never learned the basic of how a computer works (file structure, file installation...) and are not very comfortable with the PC setup (how they prefer to keep their notes on the phone makes me confused).

So the "kids" do not need to know these things for their daily enjoyment life (play videogames, watch videos, messaging... all stuff that required some basic computer skills even just 10 years ago, but now can be done much more easily, I still remember having to install some bulky pc game with 3 discs) and we nobody is teaching them because the people in charge thought "well the kids know this computer stuff better than us" so no more courses in elementary school on how to install ms word.

For a while I was convinced my students were screwing with me but no, many of them actually do not know the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste. If it’s not tablet/phone centric, they’re probably not familiar with it.

Also, most have used GSuite through school and were restricted from adding anything to their Chrome Books. They’ve used integrated sites, not applications that need downloading. They’re also adept at Web 3.0, creation stuff, more than professional type programs.

As much as boomers don't know how to use PCs because they were too new for them, GenZs and later are not particularly computer savvy because computers are too old for them.

I can understand some arguments that there's always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don't think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame. If one is going to consume content, okay, fine. Like, as a TV replacement or something, sure. But there's a huge range of software -- including most of what I'd use for "serious" tasks -- out there that doesn't fall into that class, and really doesn't follow that model. Statistics software? Software development? CAD? I guess Microsoft 365 -- which I have not used -- probably has some kind of cloud-based spreadsheet stuff. I haven't used Adobe Creative Cloud, but I assume that it must have some kind of functionality analogous to Photoshop.

kagis

Looks like off-line Photoshop is dead these days, and Adobe shifted to a pure SaaS model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Criticism

Shifting to a software as a service model, Adobe announced more frequent feature updates to its products and the eschewing of their traditional release cycles.[26] Customers must pay a monthly subscription fee. Consequently, if subscribers cancel or stop paying, they will lose access to the software as well as the ability to open work saved in proprietary file formats.[27]

shakes head

Man.

And for that matter, I'd think that a lot of countries might have concerns about dependence on a cloud service. I mean, I would if we were talking about China. I'm not even talking about data security or anything -- what happens if Country A sanctions Country B and all of Country B's users have their data abruptly inaccessible?

I get that Internet connectivity is more-widespread now. But, while I'm handicapped without an Internet connection, because I don't have access to useful online resources, I can still basically do all of the tasks I want to do locally. Having my software unavailable because the backend is unreachable seems really problematic.

I am very slightly annoyed that people haven't moved onto Opus which gives you better compression and quality than MP3. MP3s are still useful for any older devices that have hardware decoding like radio sets, handheld players, etc. Otherwise, every modern device should support Opus out of box.

Hilariously, x264 has the same problem where there are direct upgrades with H.265 and AV1, but the usage is still low due to lack of hardware accelerated encoding (especially AV1), but like everyone uses FLAC for the audio which is lossless lol.

I use m4a format simply because my downloader uses that format. But I think m4a sound quality is better than mp3.

Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.