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
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.
