It’s Time We Pull the Plug on the MP3
When you think of audio files, you probably think of MP3 files. The format is so popular that an entire generation of equipment is named: MP3 players. Despite their lasting popularity, it is time for MP3 to be withdrawn.
What is good in MP3s?
When the MP3s were introduced for the first time, their most remarkable quality was how much they were compared to the competitive audio formats at the time. Compared to WAV files, which are not compressed, the MP3s are tiny – they can sometimes take as little as 1 / 10th of the space.
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Feel the pressure when you listen to your favorite song?
In the late 90s and early 2000s, this kind of advantage was enormous. Little – if none – people had the internet gigabit residential. You were geek hot stuff if your PC had more than 100 GB of storage available.
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All the megaoctes counted, so no one was overly upset by the compromises.
However, today, things are very different. Even cheap phones can usually support hundreds of storage gigabytes, and some premium devices have 1 TB of storage. We will probably see phones with 2 to storage in the next year or two.
Mp3 is not the best for anything
Over time and that computers have become more powerful, we have been able to implement more complex encoding patterns that do a better work to preserve audio quality while using less data. This was particularly important for music streaming services.
What does streaming use?
So, do we broadcast MP3 files? No. Not all streaming services use the same encoding scheme, but none of them use MP3s today.
The advanced audio codec, generally written like AAC, is very popular and is used by YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music to a certain extent or another. The main advantage of AAC is that it is more “effective”. It allows you similar audio quality while using less data.
However, not all streaming services use AAC exclusively. There are better quality codecs like vorbis, opus and a handful of different Flac streaming options.
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All of these options allow the user (and service provider) to balance the bandwidth and quality storage problems, as they see fit.
MP3s are surely perfect for storage
MP3s are not the best format for long -term storage of audio files. The MP3 format uses what is called compression with loss, which means that some of the information that was present in the original recording is destroyed when you shrink it. If you archive something for the future, you want the best recording possible. This is also why certain image and video formats (like JPG, for example) often seem worse than the source material – they used a compression with loss.
FLAC files are very popular for archival use. Flac uses what is called lossless compression, which allows you to make a file smaller without losing data. The compromise is that FLAC files are larger than MP3 files.
However, when you can pick up storage teraoctets relatively by little cost now, the difference between a 4 mega-centers and a flac of 12 mega-centers really important? Storing tens or hundreds of thousands of songs is much more profitable than before.
It’s time to retire MP3
The only thing MP3 has for them today is a large compatibility. If it is sound and has been built in the past 25 years, it is quite sure that he will return the MP3 back.
However, AAC is almost as universally sustained and better in all other ways. The only major difference you would notice on your PC is that the file extension is M4A or M4B rather than MP3.
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FLACs, although larger than AAC files, are also largely supported by almost all modern devices. I can’t even think of a recent example where I met something that doesn’t Support them.
The MP3 file format has had a good execution, but it is time for another format to take its place as a “default” audio file that we use on the Internet. It may be a file format that uses AAC; Maybe it will be completely new.
Anyway, the MP3 format is long for replacement, and I am happy to listen to everything that comes.
