MP3

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MP3 is an audio compression format which replaced wav and aiff around the web 1.0 era. Nobody in real life knows what it fucking is, but thanks to the patent holders' propoganda, everybody wants an "em pee three" player these days rather than just a fucking music player. it can squeeze the fuck out of your random sound recordings of you, your friends, your unfunny jokes or your singing friends. With their small size, they can easily be shared on the Internets, which eventually resulted in lawsuits from the RIAA. Just seed MOAR.

Audiophiles and DJs enjoy whining and complaining about how poor the quality of MP3 files are - how certain frequencies are distorted, and how awful the compression artifacts sound. Apple uses an AAC compression format that is touted to be of higher quality. Most people cannot tell the difference between CD audio and MP3s, especially when it's encoded at a compression rate higher than the 128kbps standard and played on shitty computer speakers. A lot of audio on the internets is thus encoded at 256 and 320kbps for higher fidelity. However, the bit rate needed to make Insane Clown Posse sound "high fidelity" is estimated to be infinity (1411kb/s, actually).

Ogg Vorbis Opus

There is another sound compression format called Ogg Vorbis; which has a better compression ratio, but you wait more miliseconds for the file to open, because it's too damn compressed, which is why nobody uses it, crossfading? no, you need to buffer more, for playing ogg vorbis files. Media players are not optimized for using the ogg decoders. When you use ogg vorbis, that won't make the whole world use ogg vorbis with you just because you are leading people to.

The evolution to OGG, Opus, arrived back in 2012, but no one really gave a shit. Theoretically, it's better than all codecs before it, because Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bitrate narrowband speech to very high quality stereo music. However, no one actually uses it because there are barely any programs that can play it, and it can't be distributed at all.