if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because…

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
  • folkrav@lemmy.world
    51·
    1 year ago

    I’ve yet to meet someone who can genuinely pass the 320kbps vs. lossless blind-test on anything but very high-end equipment.

    • Supermariofan67@programming.dev
      11·
      1 year ago

      People are able to on some songs because mp3 is poorly optimized for certain sounds, especially cymbals. However, opus can achieve better quality than that at 128k with fewer outliers than mp3 at 320k, which saves a lot of space.

      • folkrav@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        Oh, yeah, not arguing that Opus is the superior format. It 100% is. Not questioning that.

        Indeed, the first place that gets hit by lower bitrates with MP3 is high frequencies. MP3 does have a pretty harsh cutoff at very high frequencies… that the vast majority of equipment can’t reproduce and most ears can’t hear. It’s relatively debated, some claim to be able to “feel” the overtones or something like that. I’m extremely sceptical, if I’m being honest. Last time I did the test - must have been a decade ago - I couldn’t distinguish lossless and high bitrate MP3 any more accurately than a coin toss.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
      8·
      1 year ago

      We’re not talking lossless. The comment above specified Opus-encoded OGG, which is lossy.

      For example, I converted my music library from MP3 to OGG Opus and the size shrank from 16 GB to just 3 GB.

      And if converting from lossless to both MP3 and OGG Opus, then OGG does sound quite a bit better at smaller file sizes.

      So, the argument here is that musicians are underselling their art by primarily offering MP3 downloads. If the whole industry would just magically switch to OGG Opus, that would be quite an improvement for everyone involved.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 year ago

      320 kbps is approaching lossless audio compression bitrates.

      Opus does better in about half the space. And goes down to comically low bitrates. And his obscenely small latency. It’s not simple, but hot dang, is it good.

      The Quite Okay Imaging guy did a Quite Okay Audio follow-up, aiming for aggressive simplicity and sufficient performance, but it’s fixed at a bitrate of 278 kbps for stereo. It’s really competing with ADPCM for sound effects in video games.

      Personally, I think an aggressively simple frequency-domain format could displace MP3 as a no-brainer music library format, circa 128 kbps. All you have to do is get forty samples out of sixty-four bits. Bad answers are easy and plentiful. The trick is, when each frame barely lasts a millisecond, bad answers might work anyway.

    • tal@lemmy.today
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think that people overstate MP3’s losses, and I agree at 320k that it’s inaudible, but I can or at least have been able to tell at 128k, mostly with cymbals. Granted, cymbals aren’t that common, but it’s nice to not have them sound muddy. And, honestly, there just isn’t a lot of reason to use MP3 for anything compressed today, other than maybe hardware decoding on very small devices and widespread support. There are open standards that are better.