When that happens, what do we do with all our mp3 files?
ShadowsouL, Self-Appointed Honorary Moof Milker
LET'S BE IN YOGA!
It will never happen.
It looks a bit sweaty in there so you may need to apply baby powder Zapp Brannigan
MP3's hit the sweet spot of being "good enough" for general consumption. There are other formats now that provide better quality, but tend to be used only by professionals and those who really care about the quality of the digital recording.
shareMP3's hit the sweet spot of being "good enough" for general consumption. There are other formats now that provide better quality, but tend to be used only by professionals and those who really care about the quality of the digital recording.
That sums it up well. It also was where the industry was at when the vinyl LP record was king.
Compared to a 15 IPS half track analog master tape, a vinyl record was clearly inferior and undesirable. But it was what was available to the masses. No professional would have ever picked "vinyl" over a copy of the grand master tape.
But here we are today with hipsters extolling the alleged virtues of the lowly LP as if it was the Holy Grail. Plenty of suckers out there to be sure. And perhaps one day some fast talking huckster will bring back the MP3 as "superior" to the AES/EBU LPCM audio that the masses can get today. And people will line up to pay ridiculous prices for a lesser product because other hipsters are doing it.
LPCM will remain what "professionals and those who really care about the quality" use. The number of bits, sampling frequency and number of channels will undoubtedly expand, if only because the concept of "more" is what sells new products. My middle aged ears can't really tell the difference between the old Red Book CDDA standard and the latest 24-bit, 192 kHz LPCM files, but if an artist makes a hi-rez LPCM version available, sure I'll use that. My little Plenue still isn't close to full...
mp3 will always have its "good enough for the masses" market. But to satisfy professional audio engineers and rabid audio purists, like myself, I'd like to see a niche resurgence of the brief and ill-fated in the early 2000s Super Audio CD and DVD Audio formats. 24-bit 96khz oversampling as opposed to CD's 16-bit 44.1khz spec and 5.1 or even 7.1 surround remixes from the 24-track master tapes as opposed to conventional 2-channel downmixes heard on CD and mp3 for a truly immersive sound experience: Fantastic.
shareOne thing that just occurred to me is that since MP3 is entirely software-based, it's pretty hard to kill it through non-support. Even if MPEG LA declared that MPEG-2 and MPEG-2 (MP3 is layer 3 of both standards, hence the name) were end-of-lifed and revoked all licenses, there's just no way to track down and erase every last bit of code that plays MP3 files. Even if they did succeed in getting all licensed products uninstalled, there are lots of unlicensed libraries out there in programs like VLC. Aside from WAV files, MP3 is about as future-proof that you can get!
SACD may be dead as a physical product, but it seems that DSD music files live on. Again the software lives long after the hardware discs and players end production. Frankly I was surprised that my newest DAC supports DSD. The last time I checked, there aren't many true DSD DACs. Most convert from 1-bit to conventional Sigma-Delta conversion to analog.
My favorite musician has been offering multi-channel and AES/EBU quality sound tracks encoded into DVD and Blu-ray media. 24-bit, 48kHz on DVD, and 24-bit, 96kHz on Blu-ray. I don't do surround sound, but I'd love the hi-rez music on my Plenue, a portable music player that's made for hi-rez music files. I just can't find software to rim 'em.