Why Continue MP3 Development Given AAC? Options

[izscors]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I am curious why there is continued development of MP3 encoding (such as LAME) when AAC is now long-known to yield superior quality for a given bit-rate (all other things being equal)?

I can sort of understand an explanation as being for the heck of it, but given that a superior method exists, why not work on improving even that instead? I'm not technolgically sophisticated enough to comment with any authority at all, so I pose the question.

[Kujibo]

I was once of the mindset many years ago that I wanted to move away from the legacy of MP3 onto something more modern, be it Vorbis or AAC or whatever. I've spent my share of time over the last decade in my professional life porting and optimizing the MP3 codec to various platforms and I was a bit bothered by both the technology and patent issues.

However, in my personal life I tried moving to AAC a few years ago so I could listen to stuff on my PS3 and my iPod while fitting some more songs on them at equivalent quality to what I was getting for MP3. It was hard to find an encoder to work with Foobar (I won't go near the horror show of iTunes). Then I got stuff encoded, and it wouldn't play because the PS3 expected some different container or tag format. Spent some more time messing with it but in the end I just got frustrated and it seemed not worth the bother so I gave up. Maybe I was doing something dumb and things are probably different now but I just can't be bothered to fight it when I have something that already works.

So this is the problem I have with some of the more modern codecs, they come with their own problems. AAC seems to be a bit too flexible in terms of being able to put it in any container which increases compatibility problems. Ogg/Vorbis I have much love for, but I think there was a mistake made there where they let the codebooks be open ended in specification so it's really hard to get hardware with limited resources be able to efficiently decode any codebook that might come along in the future.

With MP3 it doesn't suffer any of these kinds of problems, worst you might find is a decoder that gets tripped up on an exotic tag, but that should all be straightened out after all these years.

What I am most surprised with and impressed with regarding MP3 is the continual improvements to an encoder such as LAME has yielded. I recall trying to encode lower bitrate stuff with LAME many years ago and I wasn't too impressed at all, and Vorbis back then stomped all over it. This coloured my perception of what MP3 was capable of at low bitrates, and why we should be moving on from it. However, recently I've tried to cram as many songs as possible onto what must be a 10 year old 512 megabyte MP3 player my daughter uses, and I was shocked at how well LAME did at bitrates that must have been somewhere around 64-80 kbps. It is quite listenable. Around the same time I also encoded as much as I could fit with AoTuV Vorbis at 64 kbps to my wife's Cowon player that only has about 3 gigabytes storage. I didn't perceive a massive difference in quality between the low bit rate MP3 and Vorbis.

So for me if MP3 is actually keeping up fairly well with modern codecs and is universally playable anywhere, what is the incentive to move on to something else? To me it's the continued effort of the LAME developers that have made this possible and made my life simpler. My hats off to them and please do keep working on it.

[saratoga]

So for me if MP3 is actually keeping up fairly well with modern codecs and is universally playable anywhere, what is the incentive to move on to something else? To me it's the continued effort of the LAME developers that have made this possible and made my life simpler. My hats off to them and please do keep working on it.

Your experience matches mine. My initial enthusiasm for newer formats faded when it became apparent that in practice improving the quality of typical MP3 files was no longer possible verses what LAME was capable of. At that point newer formats essentially just offered small decreases in file size in exchange for large decreases in compatibility. From my point of view, it is no longer possible to develop a format better then MP3. Since disk space (and now flash space) is so cheap, I really don't see myself moving from MP3 anytime soon, and I've gone back and replaced most of my AAC and Vorbis rips with MP3 files.

That said, AAC is still a neat format, and I continue to be interested in optimizing it for rockbox. I just probably won't bother using it aside from testing my work.