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
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.
Yeah, I’m aware. I probably wasn’t clear. I think MP3 is just the default cause of immobilism. People still using “physical” medium/digital libraries rather than streaming are becoming a rare breed, and MP3 is just… good enough. Also familiarity - I remember googling “some song - some artist mp3” being the easy way to find single titles in my teenage years lol, if I wasn’t aware of the new codecs, I’d probably default to MP3 without asking myself the question.
Well, I understood this post to mean, if you had a wish, what would you wish for? Not necessarily that it’s realistic…
I do agree with your points. Although, I can’t help but feel like more people would prefer local files, if those actually sounded better than the bandwidth-limited streaming services.
I was expanding on the subject, generating side discussion stuff. Maybe I came across as standoffish - if that’s the case, I apologize.
I’m not sure how much people would care… Even back then, convincing people around me that their 128kbps MP3 sounded like it played on a tiny dollar store external speaker playing in a shower was almost impossible. Tons just download MP3s off of YouTube and call it a day. So many people don’t seem to care, unfortunately.
Convenience is the best motivator, IMHO. Downloading MP3s and loading them on your MP3 player used to be easy. You had sites literally letting you download songs directly. Torrents were big. Hell, going back, eMule/Kazaa, even Limewire, all was much easier than buying CDs and ripping them, or even when buying from online stores became a thing, with the DRM early on, etc, downloading was much less hassle.
Now people pay one price and get to listen to all the music they want to listen to.