Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
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.
192 VBR OPUS and 320 VBR LAME MP3 are equally transparent. The quality depends more on mastering than bitrate, beyond 160k on MP3.
I guess my collection's just not big enough for this to have become an issue.
As a music producer, you notice 192k MP3. The next jumps you probably don't notice. I'm still a flac snob because I have to work a lot with original quality files, but for the average users there's probably not even a difference between MP3 192k+ and flac or wav or opus or whatever.