Technology

I remember reading articles at the time of the last patents running out. Some were so misguided it was hilarious.

They called it the death of MP3! As if patents were good or necessary, instead of restrictive and troublesome for interoperability.

Yeah it works. What's the deal? You've got mp3s and then you got flac if you're audiophile.

I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there's no reason not to support the format.

MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I've been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven't ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)

My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.

About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn't grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and......get this......forked it! gasp!

Still to this day, I don't see how Winamp didn't see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn't even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!

Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.

Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let's take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID "HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???"

So that doesn't seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.

Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don't know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what's the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don't have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I'm not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.

So, if it wasn't them being blundering idiots, and it wasn't them deliberately doing this.......what the fuck DID happen?

My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.

Ogg at lower bitrates sounded better than mp3 at the same rate. Consumers dont care, but for a lot of game developers the zero patent risk and higher quality shipping with smaller files made Ogg a great choice at the time.

For me? FLACs are the only way.... which reminds me, I wonder I can still convert all the SHN (shorten) lossless files I still have. I should get on that before a converter doesn't exist.

There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something "good enough" that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.