Not really. Most of the world has moved on. MP3 is a very lossy compression system that has really gone by the wayside as it was replaced in every use for other more efficient and less lossy compression schemes.
Except for those of us who have years of ripped music. Do not want to have to pull out the CDs again! Nor do I want to pay Apple $2000 for the songs that I already have... 2000 songs x 0.99 each.
> Not really. Most of the world has moved on. MP3 is a very lossy compression system that has really gone by the wayside as it was replaced in every use for other more efficient and less lossy compression schemes.
Eh, I will beg to differ a bit.
I observe that while MP3 got a deservedly terrible reputation early on, it was because the high expense of disk space, and slow download speeds, meant that songs were compressed so severely they became unlistenable (64kbps stereo was not uncommon). 15 years ago I was compressing live recordings of my band to MP3 format at 128kbps as a compromise between quality and filesize. They sound pretty bad today unless I'm in the car where you can't tell.
Today MP3 at 256kbps or 320kbps with VBR gives a listening experience which is superb -- double-blind listening tests, using normal human beings, comparing those rates vs uncompressed, show no statistically significant difference, even though they're still "lossy".
OTOH, there are some rare people whose hearing is so acute that they can reliably distinguish between uncompressed PCM at 20 bits sample depth vs. 24 bits depth. I imagine they might be able to tell 320kbps VBR MP3 from lossless.
But who cares? Delivering very high quality sound, with file format portability and player compatibility, is worth infinitely more in the marketplace of real products, than the perfection only audible to 0.00001% of the population.
Has the world moved on? Well, better compression schemes have been developed, and the existing ones like MP3 have been improved immeasurably since their introduction. But every time someone posts an audio file in a format that most of the world cannot play, they will look around for something more portable and compatible. High bit-rate MP3 and other lossy compression schemes will continue to enjoy popularity in the general marketplace.