Full MP3 Support Being Added To Fedora Linux

[ElectricPrism]

Sure I still use MP3 on some level, but overwhelmingly it pales in comparison to contenders.

Feels like a game of smoke & mirrors to stay relevant, really idiotic. Sorry guys, we'd rather not use MP3 anymore for more than portable stuff.

[bug77]

So there's no need to be sad. Ogg Vorbis had already offered an alternative for those who did have a problem with the licensing, but science should be allowed to directly profit from successful research in order to fund more research and to have the industry pay for it. And as long as we still have patents was this far from being a bad use of software patents. Let's not forget RedHat is still a profit organization. I wouldn't lose any sleep if RedHat had to pay a penny to every open source developer for making money with free software. Just saying...

It's only sad to see the technology that was once my go-to for music is now an also ran. Because, really, it was a game changer back then. But what can you do, life goes on.

[srakitnican]

Well, I don't think mp3 is dead at all. The main reason for this is practical purposes. Many devices with built-in DAC still only supports mp3 and wma. For that reason is not really practical to store audio files in any other codec.

[bug77]

Well, I don't think mp3 is dead at all. The main reason for this is practical purposes. Many devices with built-in DAC still only supports mp3 and wma. For that reason is not really practical to store audio files in any other codec.

Oh, it's not dead. Not by a long shot. It's just no longer THE go-to solution.

I mean, when it first came out, it was going against WAV, MIDI, MOD and S3M. MP3 was a no brainer (and with a fast 486 CPU it could encode in real time - 1 hour of music in 1 hour of crunching!). But today it is soundly beaten on many fronts. You can have free encoders, you can have encoders that sound better than an equivalent MP3 at the same bitrate. Still, few codecs have wider support and if you want to play your music on a lot of devices, MP3 is still the best choice.

[szymon_g]

What's the point of using mp3 when aac is freely available?

[bug77]

What's the point of using mp3 when aac is freely available?

Like I said above: device compatibility. Nowadays, most devices will play both MP3 and AAC. But not all.
Also, if your collection is already in MP3 format, you gain nothing by encoding it again as AAC.

[DanL]

AAC is patent-encumbered and tagging it using Linux utilites is even less fun than dealing with the many quirks of ID3. Personally, I find mp3 sounds better than AAC at higher bitrates, though I'm probably in the minority on that.

[bug77]

AAC is patent-encumbered and tagging it using Linux utilites is even less fun than dealing with the many quirks of ID3. Personally, I find mp3 sounds better than AAC at higher bitrates, though I'm probably in the minority on that.

They sound the same at higher bitrates. Starting from an argument about analog vs digital, a friend of mine went on to do blind tests (comparing 192kbps MP3 with FLAC) and he couldn't reliably tell the difference using $2000+ worth of equipment.
AAC sounds better at lower bitrates (below 128kbps), but nobody encodes at that anymore.

[EarthMind]

Software patents, what's that?
~ almost every European

[pal666]

science should be allowed to directly profit from successful research in order to fund more research and to have the industry pay for it.

this is bullshit fantasy. in reality studies show that research progresses faster in patentless jurisdictions. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/genera...al/against.htm