What bitrate do you use?
Reply #39 – 2009-07-16 03:19:13
You could argue that sfb21 bloat is a problem with MP3, and you'd be right. It's becoming less of one as storage expands. I could maybe buy into this particular argument if you were talking about those little 4 gigabyte "chewing gum pack" $30 MP3 players (or the same thing from Apple for about $90, minus a screen), but I really don't see your point when a decent hard drive player has almost 200 gigabytes and nothing you ever do will fill it. Hell, even flash players have 32 gigs now and a micro-sdhc expansion port. At any rate you're still arguing about how many weeks or months worth (if played nonstop) of music you can pack onto a device that will be obsolete next year by a model with twice the space that costs half as much. If you did skimp on storage, the -y switch should unbloat the file quite nicely at the expense of a very small amount of quality. It's getting to the point where file size matters less and less as codec makers are still brutally trying to compete to be the world's tallest midget at absurdly low bitrates. I think that when MP3 has overstayed its welcome, it will be because storage has gotten to where you will think nothing of using lossless formats. I'd expect lossy codecs in total have maybe another 5-6 years left in them, further I have to seriously doubt the relative sanity of anyone who actually buys any lossy files at CD prices. To each their own. The main problem is that everyones music collection grows, and most dap customers do not want to upgrade their daps every year. There is alot of people that might a want a flash based dap (e.g iPod Nano or Touch) to carry around their whole music collection instead of a hard drive based dap. Which atm flash storage still playing catch up with size and it's still more expensive then hard disc storage. Also if everyone adopts lossless for music, then theres still be some good use with lossy codecs for streaming media to save bandwidth. I have to admit paying full CD price for a lossy album is pretty lame, but it does the job for very rare albums that you cannot find.