MP3 Considered Harmful

People bitching about “death of MP3” articles made me look:
NPR on MP3

Which is actually quite reasonable. I haven’t deliberately touched MP3 in a decade, because AAC sounds better in 2/3 the space (typically 256k AAC is better than 320k MP3). I keep some original rips or purchased music in FLAC, but that’s still unusably large on an iPod or iPhone.

MP3 was designed to encode “Tom’s Diner” and sounds worse the further you get from that.

The MP3 patents expired in April 2017 (maybe: with continuations and overlapping patents it’s hard to be sure), which means ideologues who don’t want to pay for software other people invented, can now use MP3 instead of the noxious OGG format which sounds like a backfiring car; they still won’t use AAC or anything else from this century. But for everyone else, it means we continue using better formats whenever possible.