What does it mean that MP3 is free?

A Mitch Hedberg quote isn't as appreciated as it once was, but it still is!

The name didn't help, but the biggest issue was when I first encountered the format it was very difficult for me to find software that could play it. It's been a while, but IIRC Windows Media player and Realplayer didn't like it, I can't remember if WinAmp the time supported it either, I think it may have gotten it eventually?

As a long time creative worker in addition to my technical work, I’ve tried in vain to explain to the FOSS crowd that names, UIs, user flows, etc a) really matter if they want anyone outside of the technical world to use their tools, and b) what other software developers think of them isn’t a good measure of those things. What Mastodon would need to have done to be a Twitter replacement for general audiences was my most recent losing battle. Lots of haughty, dismissive “federation is not that complicated” and “I think toots is a cute analog to tweet and the people who don’t like it just need to get over it.” Well, the nearly immediate mass exodus after the incredibly energetic mass adoption says everything we need to know about that.

“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.

Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.

>Klingon-esque

The "Og" in Ogg was a reference to "Orion ship G" in the game Netrek (https://www.netrek.org/) so definitely not Klingon :)

(Nettrek was a star trek themed online space combat game featuring Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Orion as the playable factions)

Colloquially they were always just referred to as Oggs, which wasn't too weird to my ears.

To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).

By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.

But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.

They are something to mention on your resume, or to impress investors that don't subscribe to "move fast and break things"

IBM does a lot of things, but "holding patents" is one of the big ones.

Speaking as someone who has filled up his phone pushing music onto it via SyncThing - 320 kbps MP3 gets me a lot further than FLAC!

I couldn't hear a problem with properly-encoded high-bitrate MP3 when my ears were much, much younger, and I still cannot do so today.

I can play an MP3 anywhere that music files are played. I still can't do that with FLAC.

I know that FLAC is perfect, and that MP3 is lossy, and that such lossy formats have generational loss in re-encodes.

But I can either manage multiple overlapping collections of digital music and a conversion system, or I can manage a single collection and skip a lot of that inconvenience.

I chose simplicity.

I rip to flac and then use fileflows to convert to opus personally then syncthing to get the 50 gb of opus files to my phone. As flac my cd collection is around half a terrabyte so it only recently became possible to out the whole thing on my phone for just excessive money (grapheneos doesnt run on a phone that supports sd cards so that cheaper compromise was out for me)

I rip and convert to FLAC primarily for the reasons you stated, but I also have to convert to MP3 when I want to play music from an SD card on my car's head unit.

Not him, but I use lossy because phones have small capacities and I can't be bothered to have lossless on pc + lossy on phone.

They don't. You now subscribe to Copilot 365 or whatever the hell Office is called today for the low, low price of $12.99 per month for the rest of your life.

It’s actually still a bit tedious on the Apple ecosystem. On the web (Safari) you have to wrap it in a WEBM or CAF container, and on iOS it’s similar. That’s a lossless process, but it’s still not the OPUS container

To me it seems OPUS is transparent at much lower than 120.

32 is more than enough for books/podcasts, 96 is more than enough for music. I doubt above-96 makes much sense for OPUS - I'd use FLAC if I needed better quality.

I enjoy being able to use vintage computers and vintage portables too.

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Yeah you can plug iPhone into computer, which I haven't done for years now. Only reason was to load it up with mp3s.

Last weekend I've tried to do the same without a computer and basically you can only use players like VLC which only allowed me to load single file (playlists are there, but again you have to connect to computer).

Edit: Just tried one more time and you can place files into VLC folder (using Files is a bit tedious tho) and they appear in VLC player. Yay.

Okay I've just tried VLC once again and it's almost useable - I can easily select all mp3's from local files and play them. It doesn't allow to copy them into VLCs library tho - so no playlists.

Edit: Just tried one more time and you can place files into VLC folder (using Files is a bit tedious tho) and they appear in VLC player. Yay.