I use M4A but I’m not sure if it matters much.
Much like GIFs, MP3s will never go away.
Sure there are better alternatives, but widespread adoption over decades now is hard to gloss over.
Not being encumbered by patents is a huge advantage for MP3s going forward, and the reality is that MP3 is good enough for vast majority of situations. The improvements newer formats like AAC bring are not worth the trouble of being chained to a proprietary format.
There’s always Opus.
Sure, but is there any practical benefit using Opus given that MP3 is much more widely implemented?
Much better quality for the same bitrate and it’s supported pretty much everywhere too.
I was a flac snob when I was younger, and I can say with certainty: 320kbps mp3s or even VBR are indistinguishable from opus or even lossless except when listening very very very closely on high end hardware. I’m very into audio still and production etc. That’s not to say opus isn’t better or higher quality, but the difference it makes is decidedly negligible to the vast majority of listeners. I guarantee that almost everyone would fail to do better than a coin flip a/b testing these technologies on the same audio recording.
192kbps opus will allow you to achieve roughly the same quality as 320kbps mp3. If you stream your music from any device or have a larger collection this difference can matter a lot.
I guess my collection’s just not big enough for this to have become an issue.
AAC-LC is patent free too nowadays (not HE-AAC, but that’s mainly useful for low-bitrate stuff).
good to know
flac is my standard go to anyway. If I need to move music to a more limited storage medium, flac->mp3 is where it’s at.
