[MusicallyInspired]

So I bought the lifetime updates subscription for Cakewalk Sonar a couple years ago and I get all future rolling updates for free. I just got an email saying that MP3 exporting is now included for free in all versions as "the patent royalties associated with MP3 encoding expired." If this is true across the board I hope this paves the way for the end of MP3's monopoly on the digital music marketplace. Video games have already long abandoned it for the most part, but it's been super prevalent in the world of music because, I suspect, there were people in power trying to mooch money off of the MP3 licenses. Now that that doesn't exist can we finally see the end of this lossy nonsense on the horizon? At least in the marketplace? I'm still abhorred that people pay for destroyed audio. MP3 is a truly recognizable brand and people are familiar with it etc. I think it still has a place in portable devices with headphones because you'll never hear full quality on headphones anyway (especially conventional headphones) and you would obviously like to fit as many files on your phone as possible (even though I think OGG is better for that), but I've always wanted to see the purchasing of MP3 music as a thing die a horrible death. Or at least have the marketplace venues provide a lossless alternative AS WELL (like Bandcamp does). Not the option of one or the other, but both. Thoughts?

EDIT: Just did a quick search and found that the relevant patent expired April 16th and there are still a couple more that expire in August and December and then that's it everything's public domain. Apparently it would cost $2500 to license MP3 in a video game, for instance. That money machine seems to be coming to an end, which to me is exciting.

[Mark]

Just guessing. Storage and bandwidth were likely more expensive during the MP3 era than they are now. To carry both MP3 and lossless versions may not have been cost effective for the big companies. I don't think I could hear a difference between a CD or an MP3 copy in 320kbps bit rate. 128 was great for my portable players. I always bought CDs so downloading MP3s was a non issue for me. But judging by the huge market over many years others must have felt the same way, it fit their needs. MP3 worked for them. And if capitalism allowed some people to make a buck off the technology I'm fine with it. I'm also fine when the patents run out and those people lose their income stream. Its the 'murican way. I have never made an quality comparison between mp3 and ogg for the same file size song. There, that was a nice hodgepodge of points all slapped together in one paragraph.

[MusicallyInspired]

That may have been the case with commercial MP3s 15 or even 10 years ago, but it's certainly been long enough now that we don't need to take those considerations into account. People are just used to it now.

While I and some people CAN, not being able to hear the difference between MP3 and CD isn't the point, the point is you're not getting the full quality. It's a devolution of audio medium that everyone has just accepted and this annoys me. It's better now, but when iTunes and things like that first started it was absolutely atrocious yet people still did it. The change was different from the vinyl vs CD debates because those are two entirely different types of audio (whereas MP3 and CD are both digital and one is clearly inferior in every way) and the argument was less about quality and more about "how it sounds" as there's an inherent different in the nature of recorded sound on tape and cut to vinyl than on HDD and burned to disc. Personally, I think having the best quality for an album equates to getting the album on a medium that it was at the time mainly produced for. Of course, you can argue that modern pop music today doesn't have much depth and is produced and condensed and engineered in the studio in a way to exist just fine as an MP3, which is fair, but I don't really consider that type of music a true artform anyway. Or essentially, I still believe there's still a difference in quality between the CD (or the lossless) and the MP3 but it's not a big loss; it doesn't matter to me because the music sucks anyway. I'm also not against downloading MP3s. I'm also not against listening to the radio. I am against paying to listen to the radio, however, which by its very nature is low quality and a condensed compressed version of its originally engineered self. There's also huge problems with the way music is mastered BEFORE it's put to medium which is a whole other issue...

Also, not everyone lives in 'murica. Certainly not the German-based Fraunhofer Society which MP3 and MPEG were developed and licensed by.

As for the comparisons between OGG and MP3 at comparable bitrates regarding file size, it's not even a comparison. MP3 has gotten better over the years at well it should have (just not good enough for me), but higher frequencies have always sounded much better on OGG files than MP3 at the same bitrates. And the file size comparison isn't even a competition. OGG files are incredibly small and put MP3 to shame. Sometimes a standard 3 minute song can be under a megabyte. When MP3 gets to that level (if it hasn't already) then using them as a portable music player format would be a complete non-issue for me (I don't really care about it as it is, but if people are citing file size as a reason for not wanting the obviously larger lossless formats, then there's already a better alternative than even MP3s around).

[Mark]

I had a hard time believing some of those numbers. After testing I found I could get a 3 minute song sown to 1.4MB in ogg format but it was with the quality slider all the way down. I don't know what bitrate that is. Quality wise it sounded comparable to a 2MB 96kbps mp3. So I certainly don't hear any big difference between ogg and mp3 at various bitrates. I was listening to a very loud and busy heavy metal song. More extensive testing with other types of recordings may show a bigger difference. Since my car stereo and my Zune player don't do ogg I'll be staying with mp3 for the foreseeable future.

I agree that audio quality on FM radio sucks big time. Massive compression to boost modulation levels.

[MusicallyInspired]

I haven't been using OGG myself for a while because portable players even on phones just don't support it as well as MP3 if at all. It works but on my phone it causes skips and pauses in the audio every now and then which is super annoying (all my music is on an SD card which is probably part of the issue too). I probably have a faulty memory for sub-1MB files for songs as long as 3 minutes, but the file sizes are definitely lower than MP3 and the audio quality doesn't suffer as much. Certainly not 10 years ago. Again, MP3 has improved so it's probably about even (except for file size) and it's largely a nonissue with me anyway as I said.

However, I hope that experiment was just for this purpose and you don't make a habit of listening to 96kbps files. That's just blasphemy. Anyone who does that is just adding to the problem...

[K1n9_Duk3]

Here's how I compared the quality of OGG vs. MP3 vs. lossless:

load the lossy audio into audacity
invert the lossy audio
load the lossless audio as a second track
make sure both tracks are aligned correctly
merge the tracks

The result of merging the two tracks is essentially the difference between the two audio files. If the compression was any good, you get silence.

[Mark]

15 years ago or whenever I started burning CDs with mp3s on them I used 160kbps for most of them and then 320 for my absolute favorites. It was for computer use only as I didn't have any portable player for mp3s. The original CDs played in my car or home stereo system, mp3s on the computer where quality wasn't a major concern.

[Engel220]

I mainly use 320kbps mp3 for my old iPod Classic (Fuck, I wish Apple would bring that back with a lot more storage and updated, faster hardware), though that's a compromise on storage as I'd only get about half my collection on there if I used WAV files.

I wish there were more providers of digital music who offered freedom of choice for format downloads like Bandcamp do. I realise that cost for servers that store multiple copies of the same content plays into it, but companies like Amazon and iTunes probably make multiple times the average yearly profit that sites like Bandcamp do and yet they limit the quality options.

[Mark]

Are Bandcamp prices the same as Amazon and iTunes?

[MusicallyInspired]

Bandcamp prices are whatever the seller wants them to be. It's more controlled by the artist than iTunes or Amazon are. Bandcamp just takes a small percentage cut. As a result, it's really more indie artists and not popular bands and record labels. Also, sadly, Bandcamp is not recognized as an eligible means of distribution for the Grammy organization, which I hope changes in the future.

[Engel220]

MusicallyInspired, on 28 April 2017 - 05:09 AM, said:

Bandcamp prices are whatever the seller wants them to be. It's more controlled by the artist than iTunes or Amazon are. Bandcamp just takes a small percentage cut. As a result, it's really more indie artists and not popular bands and record labels. Also, sadly, Bandcamp is not recognized as an eligible means of distribution for the Grammy organization, which I hope changes in the future.

Bandcamp is slowly becoming more popular with big labels, I'm seeing more and more big names coming to it, but currently it is held up more by indie artists working to their own price points. As for the Grammy thing, I generally dislike how the Granmys are handled but Bandcamp is as legit a platform as any so it should be added in my opinion.

[Daedolon]

There are lots of huge labels on Bandcamp, stuff like Prophecy etc.

[MusicallyInspired]

I definitely believe Bandcamp's approach will take over the traditional music distribution or at least coexist with it. Won't be long before it's accepted as a legit platform by those in power, because it definitely is legit. Good to hear there's lots of big names and labels there. It's pretty much the go to place for indie game soundtracks, as an example.

[Mark]

On Bandcamp I didn't do a label search but an artist search of 14 of my favorites bands ( what I consider popular ) turned up empty. But I'm used to that. It was many years after the release of CDs before I was able to find my style of music on them. Maybe not quite as long of a wait, but even on vinyl records it took a while to find the music I listened to. Or seaching through the "imports" rack to find them because they didn't have a U.S. release.