I might be a deadbeat stoner but I am not abusive. mostly

 

yeap you got me beat for sure... must have been cool to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan ( maybe wrong country for you )

were there any good 8 track players made? the one my family had was pretty temperamental

me too .. and yes they do.. !!

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 14, 2017

Isn't it stupid that we never learn? MP3 was patented, closed source and had to be licenced. Everyone was complaining about it and just hoped for the 25 years of patent protection to finally stop. Now is the day and what do the people? They jump on the next codec from the same group (Fraunhofer), called AAC, that is also patented, only in parts open source (the patented parts are closed source) and has to be licenced. This patent will at least last until 2024.

It's not that there wouldn't be high quality, real open source alternatives, like the brilliant Opus, which is not just competitive but also provides the lowest latency of all codecs. 25 ms by default, can be reduced to 5 ms. Live playing with this codec? No problem. AAC? >100ms That's just one example.

Stupid, just stupid.

 

now we'll wait the next update for Logic pro x, will delete the mp3 option in export section

 

Next time you are visiting Youtube search for TECHMOAN. Visit his channel and view his video list. Lots of his videos are about audio hardware from the past, some that I never head of before.

 

I've not used MP3's since I realised that if you tap a badger's head 3 times on a Wednesday ALL music is streamed directly to your ears on demand for the next 7 days.. All free, and at the original quality it was recorded at.

Who'd have thought that a woodland animal would turn out to be MP3's successor.

 

To answer your question, I don't think there were any good 8-track players. For those who don't know, full albums were put on these things. They were limited to roughly 10 minutes of stereo. So, there were 4 separate tracks of stereo on a cartridge. At the end of each 10 min track, the playing head would move to track 2 position, and so on. That means that a song you were listening to would fade out, switch tracks, and fade in on the next track, which took about 10 seconds sometime. I remember listening to the long version of "In A Gadda Da Vida" (about 20 minutes) and hating the track switch in the middle of the song. The tape decks were horrible. Sometimes the tape would not seat on the head properly and you had to push the cartridge up, or down, or hold it in so it would make proper alignment with the play head. That is why I say there were no good players in my experience. But......you have to realize, other than radio, this was the first time we could take our favorite music with us and play it in a vehicle, so the hassles were worth it. I was fortunate enough to have an 8-track recorder so I could record my favorite vinyl albums to take with me. My first hack!! The record companies hated the recorders.

It was very cool to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Also saw Elvis as well on Sullivan. My parents were very open to new things, so when something like this was becoming big, the 7 of us mostly had the small black and white tv to ourselves. We lived 60 miles from Memphis, so it was not unusual to see people like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins etc playing in our area in their early days. I remember my brother driving us by Graceland shortly after Elvis bought it, hoping to see him behind the gates. When I grew older, I got to see many of the Stax stars perform. After a few more years, I was fortunate to perform with some of the artists of the area. In 1975, I ran into Jerry Lee Lewis' manager, and went with him to a small club where we partied the night away at a small table with Jerry Lee. We 3 drank whiskey all night, but the parts I remember were great. Just living in an area where there was such an abundance of lively new talent was great, but seemed somewhat normal to us. Seeing Elvis on tv was not a huge thing for us as it was for millions of others, because we were already familiar with him around the area. But, when I saw the Beatles on tv, I knew the game had permanently changed, and was star struck as was the rest of the world. Such a different time from today, but glad I got to see it.

 

You never had to pay it, the license fee is for people who create software that creates MP3s. They no longer sell the license which means no new software will be able to legally create MP3s. They realize MP3 is old and there are way better formats already, so they want to help them get mainstream - that's why they no longer sell the license to software developers.

 

Long live OPUS, better than AAC+

 

Are you sure? All I got was a nasty bite and some antibiotics.

 

It's not that. It's just that patented formats by definition come with powerful companies supporting them. And they can make very hard to use a free format/codec. And they hit mainly the weakest point: the software/hardware players. I don't know for a fact, but I bet it's hard to put an Opus compliant media player in the Apple/Google/MSoft online stores. And they sure won't include support in their factory media players, since they're paying for MPEG standards like H264, H265, AAC (MSoft, Apple) or VP9 like Google.

 

Indeed... sounds like you were in one of the right places.. at the right time, especially for a music lover/player.

good on ya man... very cool history, you got to be a part of it even a little..
I was not around to see the Sullivan premiers but, it must have been like a revelation in so many ways,
and you confirm...

p.s. big lesson of mp3 ? .. most people are quite contented to sacrifice quality for quantity

some legalities may have changed..but it's probably not going anywhere anytime soon

 

But that's what I'm talking about! We are not just consumers (which would be powerful enough, just buy Opus encoded music), we are also producers. We could help establishing a format that is an advantage for all people!

Opus is already mandatory for WebRTC, for example VoIp (no wonder, it has the lowest latency). It is natively supported on Android and Linux/Unix. On Windows you can break the system barrier with LAV filters, who add Opus support. Opus can already be encapsulated in ogg, webm and mka. VLC also supports Opus natively, no need for LAV. It is directly supported in all major browsers, incl. Edge. It is the better codec and it is open source, with both, encoder and decoder code freely available. Hell, even SteamOS uses Opus. On hardware it is supported via Rockbox (includes iPods). Here's what a telecommunication provider has to say about Opus:
http://blog.simwood.com/2017/02/opus/

You see, Opus is pretty much there. Hardware DSP is still missing. This is the one-time chance to force the special interest monopolists to follow OUR wishes. Encode Opus, not AAC.

 

Topic: McDonalds is way better than Burger King! Also:


Anyway, didn't FLAC already replace MP3? Free and lossless. I mean, what's ~5x filesize, when we're talking about MB? Didn't anyone dl Berlin Brass? I got enough space on my fone for discog of Beefheart, Bowie & plenty space left over for Britney & Backstreet Bois. I think this post was sponsored by the letter B =(

 

If MP3 is not good anymore. Then why use AAC? Use OPUS. Its much better.

 

They're unrelated things. It's still important to have a good lossy format. For anything related to low bandwidth internet service: streaming, downloading.

It's as good as always, but big companies won't make money of it anymore. Instead, they want us to switch to AAC to keep making money.

Damn, I like MP3 more than ever. And AAC less than ever. Opus/Mp3 win for quality/compatibility uses.

 

Last edited: May 15, 2017

For me (most ppl?) FLAC is a low bandwidth format. I mean, it's pretty negligible to me (everyone?), the diff between getting (ie) Gorillaz album in a format that takes up ~164Mb or that takes up ~470Mb. FLAC is ubiquitous enough, nowadays, to have totally replaced MP3. Also: Skub :D

 

It definitely is not a low bandwidth format. You are so lucky to consider it that way, but you probably also have a high bandwidth internet connection. For me, the difference of your example is 5:06 minutes, for example. Others will have an even larger difference. That's ok for downloading, but it makes it unusable for anything where accurate timing is important (think about musicians collaborating over the web, video streams, etc.)

A new codec is not just to be considered for downloading an album.

 

Read my mind right there. Opus is the way forward. It's fully supported in all major browsers, libavcodec and popular media players such as foobar2000 since 2013. Android support rolled in late 2015. Rockbox support it natively for several years now.
Fully open-source, just like Vorbis or Theora. As of now, it requires unusual FFT length for decoding, but that should be fixed in 1.2 which will roll out this year, making it even more CPU efficient for decoding.
Just 128kbps is enough for audibly transparent track.

MP3 is very inconsistent as far as subjective quality goes. Some 320kbps ones are hard band-cut @ 16k, revealing worlds of gated artefacts. Others sound somewhat cleaner, when encoded as joint stereo at 320kbps with no extra filtering. The point is, there's no guarantee that 320kbps MP3 will sound good.

Opus works only at 48kHz sample rate, and audio band is band cut @ 20kHz regardless of bitrate.
Artefacts start to be audible below 96kbps, but the distortion is much more pleasant than with any MPEG-based codec. True-VBR is also supported, unlike MP3.

 

Last edited: May 15, 2017