if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
I’ve yet to meet someone who can genuinely pass the 320kbps vs. lossless blind-test on anything but very high-end equipment.
People are able to on some songs because mp3 is poorly optimized for certain sounds, especially cymbals. However, opus can achieve better quality than that at 128k with fewer outliers than mp3 at 320k, which saves a lot of space.
We’re not talking lossless. The comment above specified Opus-encoded OGG, which is lossy.
For example, I converted my music library from MP3 to OGG Opus and the size shrank from 16 GB to just 3 GB.
And if converting from lossless to both MP3 and OGG Opus, then OGG does sound quite a bit better at smaller file sizes.
So, the argument here is that musicians are underselling their art by primarily offering MP3 downloads. If the whole industry would just magically switch to OGG Opus, that would be quite an improvement for everyone involved.
320 kbps is approaching lossless audio compression bitrates.
Opus does better in about half the space. And goes down to comically low bitrates. And his obscenely small latency. It’s not simple, but hot dang, is it good.
The Quite Okay Imaging guy did a Quite Okay Audio follow-up, aiming for aggressive simplicity and sufficient performance, but it’s fixed at a bitrate of 278 kbps for stereo. It’s really competing with ADPCM for sound effects in video games.
Personally, I think an aggressively simple frequency-domain format could displace MP3 as a no-brainer music library format, circa 128 kbps. All you have to do is get forty samples out of sixty-four bits. Bad answers are easy and plentiful. The trick is, when each frame barely lasts a millisecond, bad answers might work anyway.
I think that people overstate MP3’s losses, and I agree at 320k that it’s inaudible, but I can or at least have been able to tell at 128k, mostly with cymbals. Granted, cymbals aren’t that common, but it’s nice to not have them sound muddy. And, honestly, there just isn’t a lot of reason to use MP3 for anything compressed today, other than maybe hardware decoding on very small devices and widespread support. There are open standards that are better.
