MP3 put out to pasture

Hum, MP3 was a flash in the pan compared to vinyl because that is still going on,

5 Likes

To the amazement of millions who were happy to put away their record brushes.

9 Likes

Cymbal chirps! Two decades from now, that will be the new Lo-Fi sound the youngin’s try to nail. Boards of Canada may run all their stuff through VHS, but the next generation will use 112kbps MP3 codecs.

11 Likes

You can already hear homages to this in the vaporwave of today.

4 Likes

It’s funny that something thought up for a tv show turned out to be a real thing:
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/lepton-image-compression-saving-22-losslessly-from-images-at-15mbs/

When I was saying before there was nowhere to go in audio compression, I was only really referring to fidelity and client-side user experience. There’s plenty of room for improvement on the server side.

3 Likes

I’m old(ish) and I miss cheap vinyl (One dollar per disk, which meant that Electric Ladyland was 2 bucks), tho I have no records to play now. But I can definitely remember being in college and thinking: “Man, it would be so cool to have your own music to play while walking around”. Then the Walkman came out. They were kinda flaky, but you could learn about magnetic tape drag! Then CD’s! Oh boy, this puppies were gonna last forever and never get scratched [Hahahahahah]. But I do rather like the fact that you can still play some of Edison’s original cylinders and no electricity required! Er with proper equipment as always.

5 Likes

Hey, don’t forget the hilarious Saturday Night sketch where they mercilessly mocked razor companies with a fake ad for a three blade razor :slight_smile:

10 Likes
14 Likes

I’m oldish too, and sometimes bought secondhand records just for the cover art or name. There was serendipity to it. I wanted to rip some old albums but they were pretty damaged from decades of negligent storage. Sadly, some of my favorite 80’s stuff was never reissued in digital.

Now when you can have a 128gb SD chip in your phone, nothing in size of collection or fidelity is out of reach. But I listen mostly to podcasts and books. Old.

2 Likes

Nope, not surprised. The Onion really has a tough job. It’s really hard to mock the already stupid.

4 Likes

Why would you re-rip them? If you’ve got the MP3s just run them through a bulk converter into the format du jour.

Now what? I just got rid of my tape deck. How am I going to listen to my tunes?

2 Likes

Because MP3s are a lossy format. Granted for 90% of your listening it is enough but you lose quality by doing that and you lose more by converting it to something else after that. If you wanna go to say FLAC or some other lossless format the way to do that is go rip the source audio again.

5 Likes

What the hell was that image over the small bit of text?

I see a market for an MP3 player with vacuum tubes

5 Likes

Heh - I wear hearing aids. I doubt I can tell the diff :slight_smile: That said, I wonder what CD rot does to music CDs over time?

1 Like

Ahh, remember all the fervor 'round about fifteen years ago with the BURN ALL GIFS because if you used GIF, then Compuserve was going to own your soul, and so on? How quaint.
https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20010402095217/http://burnallgifs.org:80/

Fifteen years from now I bet all this fuss about DRM in Web standards will seem just as cute.

1 Like

Yeah, the popularity low point for the format was when better formats came out but you still had to pay to license it. I can see it flowering, now, at least relative to that. DIY mp3 players got easier to put together.

“Buy our new, possibly worse product rather than that cheap generic stuff!”

Man, you never see those anymore!

8 Likes

FLAC does make a difference. You can hear it in the pixels.

:wink:

7 Likes

Is this a problem with commercially produced CDs? I thought this was more of a CDR issue.

That said I’ve had pretty amazing results with EAC and it’s error correction. I’ve used it on CDs with massive scratches and in some cases literal holes in the substrate have come through the other side with largely perfect rips.

1 Like