2020. 2. 11. 20:03ㆍ카테고리 없음
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Motion Picture Soundtrack by Various Artists Released August 18, 2009 Length 37: 14 Various Artists film soundtrack chronology (2007) 2007 Inglourious Basterds (2009) (2012) 2012 Professional ratings Review scores Source Rating (7.2/10) Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack to 's motion picture. It was originally released on August 18, 2009. The soundtrack uses a variety of music genres, including soundtrack excerpts, R&B and a song from the of. 'The Man with the Big Sombrero', a song from the 1943 screwball comedy, was rerecorded in French for the movie. This is the first soundtrack for a Quentin Tarantino film not to feature dialogue excerpts. The album was nominated for a, but lost to the.
Wait, people thought mp3 was dead because of that announcement?! Oo I feel like people have lost touch with the history and the entire reason many Linux distros do not distribute mp3 codecs! Some of these writers/editors really need to spend each day reading at least one headline from that day in 2016, 2015. All the way back to 1999.
MP3 is now more free/libre, or at least when it comes to encoding/decoding. Patents are one of the reasons people have been so hesitant about H.264 and why we see things like WebM. Personally, I've encoded in FLAC for years, and even in the early days (2003-ish) I was backing up CDs to oggs instead of mp3s.
Unless you're really concerned about space today, download your music in a lossless format. Sites like Bandcamp and CDBaby now support lossless (FLAC and ALAC).
People (some/many) believe what they read. Some CEOs in some corners of the planet will rush to their CIO and tell them 'I don't know what this mp3 is but lets switch to aac A-S-A-P!!!' Then the poor CTO (if he/she has a technical background) will have to take 15mins to explain to the CEO that 'mp3 is not dead, the patent is gone so not it's absolutely free, while for aac we'll have to be paying ABC amount for our XYZ product/service'. I guess the current aac patent holders are smiling now:) Confuse & conquer!!! Techmeme heading/summary: 'Fraunhofer, the major contributor to MP3, shut down its licensing program in April as MP3 patents expired — Red Hat has announced that Fedora will include official MP3 decoding and encoding. The reason is that MP3 is now patent free - as far as anyone can tell.' First linked (Engadget) article: 'MP3 is dead, long live AAC.
Its creators have abandoned licenses to the format, signing its death sentence.' Not clicking would have both saved you time and left you better informed. As a distribution format for mixed-down music that will be consumed from a portable device's internal storage, 320kb/s VBR is great. There's some unfortunate irony in that we just got out from under the MP3 patents, which mean that MP3 encoders can finally get mainlined and won't require screwing around like we're all gotten used to for a decade+ (having to add some extra repo to your apt.sources or equivalent file, etc.), but at the same time the consumption patterns of music have shifted again, away from portable devices with high-density storage like iPods, and towards streaming particularly over cell-data networks.
There is an argument, although I do not like some of its conclusions, that some of the newer codecs are preferable to MP3 if you are working within. The only way it's not superior is compatibility with ancient electronics, just like I said before. What's the problem? Why should I care about playing my music on 15-year-old hardware? I don't have any such hardware any more, so I really don't care about it.
In fact, 10+ years ago when I still had a portable music player, I had an iRiver H340. Even it played my Oggs!! So where are these shitty players that can't play Oggs? I've never had one. And these days, they don't seem to exist.
My Android phone plays them just fine, out of the box. My car even plays them right off a USB thumb drive. And of course my computer plays them easily. So again, why should I give two shits about compatibility with some ancient devices that I don't have, and likely not many other people do either?
Do you only use software that'll run on Windows 2000? At high bitrates maybe mp3 has the same heard quality. But mp3 has his artifacts, and the problem is if you heard them once, you couldn't stop youself from hearing them every time. It's like interlacing in movies or bugs at borders of contrasting areas of picture in jpeg.
And yes, this can be proved by double-blind experiment at least for 128 kbit/s mp3. With 192 kbit/s, I believe, you can hear artifacts also, but you would need some special training for it. So with 192 kbit/s solution is simple: just do not teach youself to hear artifacts. With lower bitrates it's not so simple. As for me, flac is better for storing sounds. Stored flac has no artifacts (if obtained without them), I can recode it to mp3, vorbis, opus or something else, and get artifacts from that codec, but not artifacts from mp3 plus artifacts from that codec.
Can you give some sources? What are these artifacts you talk about? And even assuming that it's audible at 192kbit/s with a decent encoder, why not just use 320kbit/s MP3 which are still significantly smaller than lossless? 16bit lossless audio is great for producers, you have a lot of headroom for messing with it, re-encoding it, twisting it, amplifying it, mixing it etc.
Death Proof Soundtrack Download 320 Mp3 Download
But if you're just archiving public releases for 'consumption' it's completely overkill. It's like interlacing in movies or bugs at borders of contrasting areas of picture in jpeg In what way? Interlacing is completely irrelevant in the context of audio.
I'm sorry if I come off as adversarial but it's a pet peeve of mine. The maths and physics behind signal processing are very well understood, if some algorithm induces a signal degradation in the audible spectrum it should be trivial to show it objectively with the right measuring equipment and/or the right mathematical equation. What are these artifacts you talk about? Splash cymbals in particular sound terrible (or noticeably degraded) on low bitrate stereo MP3s (ie 128kbit/s). Some early encoders actually did a lowpass filter to eliminate frequencies above 16kHz, to mask the 'watery' high-frequency warble (see 1). Note how even the Fraunhofer codec differs a lot at high-frequencies in the charts on that link. Some of it is still noticeable even in lower bitrate AAC.
I've got U2's Pop album on CD from 1997 (coincidentally the first album to be leaked as MP3 2), and even at 128kbps iTunes AAC the cymbals just don't sound right on 'Gone'. They're watery, like an audio version of a badly compressed JPG.
I keep meaning to re-rip it at higher bitrate. Maybe people have different hearing skills also. But I can definitely hear the artifacts in MP3s, like hihats getting muffled and the deep base getting lost in the sea of MP3 compression. With good headphones (I'm talking 200+ euros class headphones for example) there is a certain difference between even a 320 kpbs MP3 vs a 128 AAC. AAC or OGG for example just has better usualy clarity in the sound, the bass is clearer and more distinct and the hihats and other hi sounds aren't muffled in the background or don't lose their clarity like they do with MP3s. And like the parent wrote, once you have heard those 'signature losses' of the mp3 codec, it's very hard not to notice them. From my perspective, I don't think I'd ever be able to tell the difference between high quality MP3 and FLAC in an ABX test.
If I first heard the MP3 version, and then heard the FLAC. I might be able to point out which one was which afterwards, under very good conditions and depending on the recording. I remember doing this test several years back.
The general details are pretty much the same, but the MP3 version kind of changes the 'sound stage' a bit for a lack of a better term. It's very subtle and in practice, you need critical-listening environments even to do this.
99% of music is not heard in critical listening music environments. A huge amount of music isn't even engineered for this kind of critical listening these days (eg: you need recordings that haven't destroyed the dynamic range in the first place, which rules out most radio pop today.) I agree that having the ability to transcode to lossy with as little loss as possible is IMHO the best reason to store music in FLAC. I agree with all of this - I have had studies quoted to me by artists about self-proclaimed audiophiles performing worse in a double blind test identifying which was the lossless audio vs.
A high bit rate mp3 (256 kbps? The evidence seemed to suggest quite strongly that humans aren't able to distinguish either. I would love to have lossless audio purely for storage purposes - however, it would be quite expensive for me to do so with the amount of music I have, as well as time consuming. For me at least, mp3 is the perfect balance, and its ubiquitous compatibility makes it a no brainer.
I have to wonder how many who claim to immediately tell the difference between mp3 and FLAC have instead simply been exposed to horribly encoded mp3s. Although this is anecdotal, it pings off your own experiences: A friend of mine (and self-described audiophile) recently got into a discussion with a mutual friend regarding mp3, FLAC, and how both of them could tell the format apart simply by listening. I suggested that perhaps the mp3s he had available were simply poorly encoded, and sent him a sample of my library that's a direct rip from a CD (at a modest bitrate of either 192kbps or 256kbps, I can't remember). He then realized that the mp3s he had been comparing against his FLAC copies of the same album were likely YouTube rips from before he bought the album, and that he likely never downloaded the official mp3s when he purchased the FLAC sources. He confided that he had a difficult time determining which was which when comparing the two on more equal footing with the sample I sent.
I still posit that the average person can't tell the difference, even with above average hardware. Exceptionally sensitive hearing outside the normal range of most humans notwithstanding, a decently encoded mp3 (or Opus format for that matter) should hardly be distinguishable from a FLAC, if at all. I suspect that most of those who claim they can hear the difference aren't particularly special-they're just comparing poorly encoded files against a source format. At any rate, I'm in my mid-thirties, and I know my hearing isn't quite as acute as it was a decade ago. FLACs are more of a novelty for the sake of original sources, because there's no way I could tell the difference between that and mp3s with a good bitrate. With the exception of the Hunt for Red October soundtrack, I've not been able to tell low/moderate (128kbps) bitrate mp3s apart from high (384kbps) ones AFAIK (the high pitches in the hymn 'warble' at lower bitrates-not sure I can detect this now, though).
I own 'high-end cables' (not sure if the contacts are gold) and my low-end-of-high-end HiFi might sound just as good with cheaper cables but I don't know, having never (yet) tried it that way. It's very likely that all that super great sound is just the high quality amp and speakers. The same thing could be happening with lossless. If you are going to the trouble of encoding and storing a lossless digital music collection, I think chances are good you're listening on very good equipment. And you might scoff at the idea of trying out high-bitrate MP3 on it, because the MP3s you have from your Napster days really do sound terrible through your tube amp.
OTOH I wouldn't go too far down the 'can't hear it anyway' road. I'm in my 40's and there's plenty I can't hear, but I assume not everything in my collection will be on YouFacePotify for my grandkids to listen to while their ears still work. I'm generally only interested in good recordings and don't particularly care about disk space, so MP3 is perfectly fine. I'm not an 'audiophile', but I do keep lossless when possible to stay future-proof.
My scheme is FLAC when I can, otherwise MP3. I can render the FLAC to MP3 (a batch script keeps things up to date) for compatibility/size with some things, but my main system plays FLAC just fine. It isn't practical to take my full collection with me in MP3. Just checked, and the music share is currently 5.38T, but that's with a full set of MP3 dupes. And there is some garbage in there I haven't has the patience to weed out yet. I just point the phone at the MP3 directory and pick 'n choose with ITunes. If I really want some random song while not at home, I can pull it off my server easily enough, but at my age, I don't really develop strong needs for a particular song.
I wouldn't expect all codecs to come with their own container format! That seems totally wrong to me. I wouldn't expect a codec to develop their own, unique, incompatible container format, and I would hope very much that they would not (!!), but it's a real mistake to develop a codec and not specify at least some sort of preferred container format.
Otherwise, people are going to do what is often done with FLAC: not put it into a container format and just treat the raw output from the codec as a distribution format. And then complain that the whole thing sucks because there's no support for multiple streams, metadata, lyrics, subtitles, album covers, cuesheets, whatever. The way to avoid that is not to set users up for failure by releasing the bare codec without some sort of preferred container format that's used by default. If the FLAC encoder had always used OGG containers (or Matroska or Quicktime or AVI or whatever) by default there'd be a whole lot fewer bare FLAC files floating around, convincing everyone that 'FLAC sucks because there's no metadata'. That said, there are some issues with container formats as they are frequently implemented, which tends to drive users towards not using them and just exchanging bare codec output: if you separate the user from the codec with an intermediate container layer, you can create a ton of frustration when users get files that they think they can use, based on the file extension, but then get an error because they don't have the codec du jour. But there was no obvious way to tell that when they were looking at the file. The codec used is far more important to the average user than the type of container format, most of the time.
(And yeah the ideal solution would be for filesystems to stop sucking so badly at metadata; MacOS and HFS was better at this stuff in 1996 than most modern computers are today - at least it had the idea of both a file 'type' and its 'creator' as distinct things from the extension.) But in our world, the result is some containers being perceived as 'unreliable' or 'fussy' because they're used for a diversity of codecs that not all implementations have. I don't have a great solution to that second problem, but at the very least I think that the file extension should follow the codec combination used inside the file, and not the container format. An AVI container with AVC compressed video inside shouldn't have the same file extension as an AVI container with Sorenson Video inside it; those two things are not interchangeable as far as a user is concerned. Since file extensions are the only metadata users get, they need to somehow represent the combination of both codec+container. Exceptional might be the wrong term but I think there's a plateau effect: MP3 was the first mainstream codec to reach the level where most people didn't perceive any drawbacks and there's a huge inertial benefit. I don't regret ripping my entire collection as AAC / lossless but I also acknowledge that the space savings are basically a waste of time for anyone not using good speakers / headphones in a very quiet environment, and outside of a handful of pieces susceptible to pre-echo lossless was a hedge against double-encoding in the somewhat unlikely event that the future codec landscape changes dramatically.
I remember having to download LAME binaries from South America, as recently as last month, and as long ago as 1999. And I also remember when it was just a patch to Fraunhofer's reference implementation, under a suspiciously shaky interpretation of the law. I remember doing a comparison test way back in the late 90s between an officially licensed MP3 encoder and LAME on the same set of music WAV files, and was simply blown away when I could actually hear a difference in the results. Being the sort of anti-audiophile that I am, I then reduced the bitrate of the LAME encoding until I could just barely tell that it was too low, so that I could cram more music onto my hard drive, make playlists, and record them at 1x speed through the line-out port to an audio cassette tape, for my car stereo.
At the time, LAME made the smallest file sizes for the crap music quality that I tolerate. Nowadays, I encode at minimum of 96k/sec (sometimes better) just to annoy other people around me less, and to cut down on the suggestions that I get some real speakers for my phone. It ain't the speaker, folks; that's pretty much the best quality I can discern with my own ears.
When it comes to music, I think people pay far too much attention to audiophile opinions, and perhaps not enough to those who have physiological limitations on their enjoyment of music and/or recognition of speech-frequency sounds. But yeah, even I could tell when someone used a crappy encoder on their MP3 files. That's why I always ripped my own CDs, or specifically sought out lossless-encoded files, so that I could then use LAME to get an acceptable and consistent level of crappiness. Even now, I only download FLAC, and transcode my own MP3s for portable devices.
Honestly I'm looking forward to Spotify running out of money and shutting down so this generation will wake up that they need to start duplicating and archiving their media before they lose it. Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers. (I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche that it was 5-10 years ago).
I've gone the opposite route. After years of careful curating my music library, I started to feel chained to the past, listening to a handful of tracks over and over. Since music is connected to strong emotions, this would also bleed into other aspects of my life and cause me to be less forward-thinking. I'm fully aware that Spotify and its competitors are deals with the Devil but if they allow me to feel less burdened, the price is worth it. It's deeply hypocritical but I also secretly hope that at least a few people stick to archiving and curating just in case. I trained a NI expert system on the kind of music I like, and turned it loose on the Internet, where it uses the Amazon wishlist API to make recommendations.
In other words, I had a kid, played my favorite music to the baby, and can now mooch off all the wonderful new CDs that show up in the house. All CDs get ripped and encoded as FLAC for the family media drive, and everyone transcodes their own lossy files for their own portable devices. It's kind of an expensive solution, though, and occasionally fails to recommend music that I like.
The NI is loaded into a biomechanical interface that provides sensory inputs, locomotive actuators, and environmental manipulators. Typically, only one researcher builds the entire device, and collaboration is not useful for that part of the project. (Unfortunately, as the network heavily exploits subtle implementation details in the mechanicals, it is very difficult to perform upgrades after the first stages of training are completed.) From there, the researcher has to continually upload conceptual primitives through the sensory apparatus, and the NI prunes and rebalances its own neural network to establish basic foundation concepts such as object permanence, the acceleration of gravity, thermodynamics, ballistic path prediction, etc. Eventually, when the network is sufficiently trained, researchers may begin to input additional data through a natural language interface. Due to variations in the biomechanical devices, it is currently impossible to use standard bootstrap code to accelerate that process. In order for the NI to be useful as a music recommendations engine, it is essential to expose it to music that you already like through its audio sensors, during the initial training phases.
After approximately 8 years, the NI will begin to autonomously seek out music samples in the wild and recommend that you purchase copies of promising collections. The system is not perfect. It will occasionally issue recommendations for music that was already present in the training corpus, or for maliciously-formed music files designed to hack uninoculated NIs into recommending them. And it should be noted that these NIs have been known to abruptly diverge from preferences implied by the training corpus, producing wildly inaccurate recommendations thereafter. It's probably just cheaper and more reliable to use an AI, but as long as this thing still works okay, I'm going to keep refueling it.
This is what happened to me as well. I used to spend several hours per week on average looking for new music (new for me, might be old releases) and Spotify's AI basically does the job for me now. Well worth 10 bucks per month. Also, the biggest factor in 'sound quality' is the matching of the master and the device used to listen (most notably compression of the dynamic range, you want it strong on low-end speakers and/or noisy environments, and as dynamic as possible on high-end systems in good listening conditions). I'm very pleased with Spotify's masters, they're often equal or superior to the CD even, which is nice in an otherwise 'loudness war' ('bricked') market (been that way sadly since the late 90's, which brings tears to many a sound engineer). I can't speak for Apple Music (never tried it) but Google Play Music has absolutely terrible masters in many cases, way too compressed, sounding flat.
Note: I speak of dynamic range compression (audio technique), which has nothing to do with data compression (e.g. The actual end-user codec has actually little to nothing to do with it, it's all about mastering, i.e. Targeted reproduction devices and listening conditions. I embrace both.
I still manage an mp3 library and use a (modded) iPod because network access is unreliable for me sometimes. It's a curated library that I spend time adding to and culling from; it's its own little hobby. I also really like streaming services.
I like to be able to press a couple buttons and get a non-stop stream of music that I don't have to worry about, and can often lead to new artists, etc. They each have their pros and cons; I see no reason to be dogmatic about either. The separation also helps with curation; I can keep social and casual music to the streaming stuff, and keep the library focused on 'dedicated' listening. Thank you - my thoughts exactly. As an avid music collector and listener I understand that my interest in this issue probably isn't comparable to most other people, but I think there's no doubt that licensing deals will change/end and music starts to disappear from streaming services. There are already and always have been large gaps in the streaming catalogs but those are mostly releases that have never been there in the first place.
I guess it will be different when John Doe sees his Spotify library shrinking and realizes that he was just renting all this music. Can I plug something to you guys? I'm the same as you, I like collecting and listening to music, and I was tired at how fragile playlists are.
If you move some files or rename them, they break. So, I wrote a spec for a new format, which is resilient to pretty much all operations: I'm currently writing a plugin for beets, but if anyone wants to help out with implementing an import/export plugin for a music player with library functionality, I would love that. I'm basically trying to scratch my own itch here, and hopefully one that many other people have. You're right. Migrating playlist from one platform, or just a player, to another is huge problem. Keeping them in sync seems impossible. A universal cross-platform playlist format seems like a much needed feature, but I don't se ehow this could work without significant changes in every supported player/software.
Here's a very real playlist issue I'm facing right now: I use Roon as my main audio player / music management solution. Roon manages my library which is located on a NAS. I have a few playlists created there, but no way to sync them to my iPhone unless I manage a separate playlist in iTunes which has access to the very same NAS library. It's not a deal breaker since I'm used to playlists being software-specific.
Unfortunately I don't see that changing anytime since everyone's answer to this problem seems to be using one single streaming service - a solution which, frankly, handles this particular problem very well, but doesn't work for me due to disadvantages of streaming discussed earlier in this thread. Do you really think they can just pull the plug instantly, on millions of paying subscribers? At the very least, there will be a 1-month warning period, to let paid subscriptions run out. Besides that, I think it is in the best interest of the record labels to keep Spotify going.
They're absolutely raking in the cash from streaming, and have just posted their largest industry revenue increase in 20 years. I think they would be willing to keep Spotify going on life support, as long as it makes them money. Do you really think they can just pull the plug instantly, on millions of paying subscribers? There's no physical law forbidding it, and I'd wager their T&Cs contain a way to do so. They could even be magnanimous and refund the un-used portion of your last month, but you're still stuck without the music. I'll simply gather local copies of everything I like, during the shutdown period Assuming their servers can handle millions of paying subscribes downloading all of their music all at once.
Wrong on the CD-Rs: I've seen them fail before, due simply to age. It happens with the cheap ones; the 'archival quality' ones really do seem to be much better, but I have some 15 year old cheapies that are dead. You can even see on the disc that the dye has changed colors and is uneven. I've never seen a mass-produced CD (the aluminum kind) fail due to age rather than physical damage.
However I have read about it happening, where the aluminum layer wasn't properly sealed in the polycarbonate and over time got corroded. AAC makes a lot of sense for low- and medium-quality applications where bandwidth is extremely limited or expensive, like phone calls and music-streaming services, or as sound for video, for which it’s the most widely supported format. Nope; you can scratch 'phone calls' from that list. AAC (specifically, the AAC-LD variant) is not the best for low bitrate calls; you want a dedicated voice codec for that application. AAC-LD is only geared toward voice in one parameter: frame size. It's basically just a 'look, AAC can do this too if you want' feature.
Look at the remark there: 'It can use a bit rate of 32 - 64kbit/s or higher'. That's a whopping lot. 32 kbps is about the far-out upper bound on bit rate for using a voice codec. You can get very good call quality at half that. Basically if you look at all the options for compressing speech in telephony, AAC doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It bugs me that 'reputable' news outlets like Fortune Magazine were running stories which essentially amounted to a Fraunhofer You skipped a chapter on the history of the web. Formerly 'reputable' outlets have transitioned to rubberstamping their brand on any blogger they think can help them preserve their business model, so while they might admittedly still be frontrunners in name recognition and still have credibility in narrower contexts, they have all but morphed into full-time clickbait farms.
There are many examples of patent trolls but this isn't one. MP3 was new, innovative, and the result of long effort. The patent fees directly funded new research of even better technology.
That's the patent system working as designed. I just read your blog post through Google Translate. You seem to claim that they patented the use of Fourier transform for storage of music. This is not what happened at all.
The patent was granted for specifying which part of the Fourier transform can safely be discarded for storage (and reconstructed while playback) without harming the sound you hear too much. That's not something they just looked up in a 200-year-old book but took more than a decade of complex research. The result of this research is their actual product and it's a highly valuable one. Your political stance doesn't change that what you wrote is simply wrong. They did not get a patent for the Fourier transform but for something completely new which no one thought of before. Fraunhofer would not have developed audio compression if they couldn't earn money with it (they are a non-profit by the way and the money earned funds new research).
That's their business model. They have novel ideas, do hard work to make them possible, and sell that to companies. Are you suggesting people shouldn't get paid to do their work? Algorithms are the machines of the 21st century. Well, for one example, have a look at - specifically +-+ Sat May 6 23:12:02 UTC 2017 a/glibc-solibs-2.25-x8664-2.txz: Rebuilt. Ap/cdrdao-1.2.3-x8664-3.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
Ap/sox-14.4.2-x8664-4.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. D/flex-2.6.4-x8664-1.txz: Upgraded. Kde/k3b-2.0.3-x8664-3.txz: Rebuilt. Patched to build with ffmpeg3 and gcc7.
L/ffmpeg-3.3-x8664-1.txz: Upgraded. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. L/glibc-2.25-x8664-2.txz: Rebuilt. Reverted a patch that causes IFUNC errors to be emitted. L/glibc-i18n-2.25-x8664-2.txz: Rebuilt.
L/glibc-profile-2.25-x8664-2.txz: Rebuilt. L/gst-plugins-base-1.12.0-x8664-1.txz: Upgraded. L/gst-plugins-good-1.12.0-x8664-1.txz: Upgraded.
L/gst-plugins-libav-1.12.0-x8664-1.txz: Upgraded. L/gstreamer-1.12.0-x8664-1.txz: Upgraded. L/lame-3.99.5-x8664-1.txz: Added. Xap/MPlayer-1.320170208-x8664-4.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame.
Xap/audacious-plugins-3.8.2-x8664-3.txz: Rebuilt. Recompiled to support libmp3lame. The file size increase will continue to be an issue for a long time. As hard drive space started becoming cheap enough for PCs, people started wanting their songs on phones and MP3 players, where the storage was still expensive. As phones are now starting to get cheap enough internal storage for the flac file size not to matter, people are starting to stream music, where the file size is again important, as people are streaming music through cellular, where the price per gigabyte is still high. Maybe, once most people, even in the third world, have unlimited data plans, music file sizes will stop mattering.
Or maybe we will have moved on to something else entirely where big files is still an issue. Maybe people will want to stream music from earth to space stations or lunar bases, I don't know. I recall an offhand comment from a source I can't remember¹ that some people when presented with mp3s encoded at various bitrates and flac encodings of the same song preferred low-bitrate mp3 above flac above high-bitrate mp3. The person theorised that it was because the low-bitrate encoding had more noise, which gave the sound additional texture. I draw an analogy with dithered palette images which can look different, but better, than full-colour images. ¹ Yes, this is the ultimate in unreliable anecdote, sorry.
Also, I now have tinnitus and partial hearing loss, so the audio snobbery makes me incredibly envious of those people that could always hear so much better than I can, such that they just have to complain about hearing the little extra things (or notice the missing bits) that annoy them. It's great that audiophiles can hear so well, but when they start talking about tubes and premium cables and vinyl records and gold-plated contacts, I just want to give them an otitis media infection that cuts them down to my level. You just don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.
I know that's wrong to wish such ill upon others, but it's so much harder to suppress my envy when I'm being inundated by what appears from my perspective to be superstitious nonsense. As someone who can still somehow enjoy music when it's encoded as a 64k/s MP3 file, I am baffled as to how someone can say the very same music can be bad at 128k/s. I'm just glad that I can still hear it at all! Absolutely this. Mp3s wreak havoc with Pro Logic II decoders (stereo-surround processors), regardless of the bitrate, by stripping phase information which the DSP uses for sound steering.
Also, the extra speakers allow you to spatially isolate sounds that would normally be masked - this can actually be a richer listening experience, but with lossy encoding it's a mess. More generally, this applies to any scenario where the sound is distorted or altered by something. A crappy speaker might have a perverse frequency response. A room reflection might manifest as a comb filter. Both will destroy the careful masking assumptions of any psychoacoustic model.
Lossy compression should be avoided as an archival format whenever possible, even if you think you know better, because you never know when you might need the information you thoughtlessly threw away. For certain audio shapes, MP3 is a rather bad™ compression (as is, to some extent JPEG for some image shapes), whereas AAC produces much better results due to different compression mechanics. Do you base this assertion on blind testing? I'd really like to know how much of the people that says 'MP3 sounds X/Y/Z' actually did one (actually, I'd like all of them to actually do one), because in the blind tests I've participated/seen participating, with a modern encoder and mid/high bitrate (in the average range of 192/224 kbits) users were systematically not able to hear any difference. Of course I found some exceptions; for example, a friend of mine had good hearing on high frequencies, therefore, he could immediately spot 128 kbps CBR mp3s which have a lowpass threshold at 16 khz.