[deathanatos]

It's almost like we didn't learn from the days of MP3. I have several MP3s that, in certain players, are like a half hour long, despite being only 2 minutes long. My best guess was that they were assumed to be CBR, despite nothing about MP3 implying CBR… (there's not a flag or anything that says "this is a VBR" file, CBR files are just special…)

Nowadays it's mostly moot since MP3 is obsolete.

[dleslie]

> MP3 is obsolete

What should we be using instead for lossy audio?

[jchw]

The current state of the art is Opus, but HE-AAC is also superior, and then there’s always the appeal of lossless which is a lot more practical than it once was.

[LinAGKar]

HE-AAC is only useful at low bitrates though (below 64 kb/s), and supposedly never reaches transparency. Above that, you should use AAC-LC (or, of course, Opus if you can).

Vorbis is also notable as a better format than MP3, although that too is made obsolete by Opus.

[hulitu]

A format which cannot deliver quality is not state of the art. Opus is the Internet Explorer 6 of musical and video formats.

[Thorrez]

Opus is an audio format, not a video format. Opus is better than MP3. Wouldn't MP3 actually be the Internet Explorer 6 of audio formats?

https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/26167/opus-vs-mp3-...

[bjoli]

What on earh are you talking about? For lossy formats, there is currently nothing better than opus in actual use.

[jchw]

Are you mixing up Opus with something else? By many metrics, it is better at delivering quality than just about any other lossy audio codec.

[Synaesthesia]

AAC is far superior, as is OGG, on a technical basis

[rwmj]

On the basis of "can it play in my car", MP3 is the only winner. My car's player has one of those baseline decoding chips that can only do MP3.

[LinAGKar]

That's true, MP3 is by far the most widely supported lossy audio format (except presumably MP1/MP2, since MP3 decoders have to support them), so it will live on for a long time, although Opus is the best one nowadays. Just like with PNG and JPEG for images, which will live on for a long time even though we have WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL. And AVC will probably live on for a long time even though we have HEVC, VP9 and AV1.

[thaumasiotes]

I mean, what I want is for the car to have an audio input that I plug a cable into. There's no reason for the car to be decoding audio at all.

[rwmj]

"Now you have two problems." Specifically the steering wheel controls won't work and I'd have to deal with charging the second device.

[mechanical_bear]

My controls work even when I use the aux cable.

[herbst]

Same here. And it doesn't even do that very well. Imagine spending 15k or more on a brand new car in 2021 just to realize that the sound tech is borrowed from a $5 MP3 player from the early 2000s.

[rwmj]

Almost exactly the same situation as me. The worst part of it is it doesn't sort the directory entries! It displays them in the same order they are written to the directory (ie. usually random). Luckily there is https://fatsort.sourceforge.io/

[dleslie]

This is why I prefer cars where the stereo is replaceable.

[NamTaf]

My Diamond Rio PMP300 would play VBR but would shit the bed on displaying duration and seeking because it assumed CBR, as you suggested. When VBR was new, this was a pretty familiar situation and oldschool mp3 encoding standards for share sites would give the option to stick to CBR for that reason - they'd specify alt preset standard for VBR and a couple of CBR options, generally around 256kbps.

[pjmlp]

Plenty of obsolete audio files on my phone.