Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Finally Adds Native MP3 Importing Support

[caligula]

Pfft. Who knows if anything is 100% patent-free, but it was created as an open source project, 19 years ago.

It just means that the risk of patent litigation is even higher when using FLAC. Mp3 is 25+ years old and the project considered it safe only recently. Many distros enabled Mp3 last year?

[coder]

I would go on about how 24-bit is only beneficial for mastering,

My dream setup is end-to-end digital, all the way to active monitor speakers with digital volume control, digital crossovers, and digital-domain room EQ. For all that processing, you want more headroom than 16-bit, and oversampling to avoid aliasing artifacts.

Anyway, my main use case for 24-bit (probably 18-bit would be enough) is the aforementioned de-emphasis and HDCD decoding. It would be pointless to do that, and just re-quantize the result back into 16-bit samples @ the same sample rate.

I've seen Monty's arguments and I don't fundamentally disagree with him. However, since the norm is now for gear to use 24/96 DACs, it makes sense to me just to keep the signal in that form and avoid any processing losses incurred by an extra pair of sample-rate conversions.