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Ask HN: Why did Fraunhofer not realise how flawed MP3 was?

1 points by Sonic656 ↗ HN
It can't handle a lot of electronic music at all without becoming a pre echo mess even at V0 & 320kbps?. Vorbis & AAC under 192kbps are no any better If I'm being honest, 96Kbps VBR Opus 1.3 makes all 3 look like a joke.

9 comments

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Nomentatus
Compare visual compression schemes such as .jpg - they too produce nasty artifacts if you compress an already compressed file. Something plenty of people don't realize. (You need to go back to the .raw file or at least a really big .jpg and compress that more strongly.) Sure, .jpg and .mp3 could have a bit of AI to recognize already-simple or compressed files, but that's another chunky feature that doesn't affect their main use case; and .mp3 was a commercial venture. Every program can always be better, but as the old quote about art goes, no painting is ever finished, only abandoned (in a good-but-imperfect state.)
Tomte
Your music tastes are not representative of the larger population, nor is your hearing ability.

For example, in all the MP3s I've listened to I have heard a pre-echo only once: in a pre-echo demonstration on Wikipedia (where the pre-echo was even amplified).

Shortcomings exist, but were never relevant to the masses.

Besides, the alternative to MP3 back then wasn't using another format, it was "I cannot download music at home".

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pinewurst
Electronic music wasn’t the corpus that they tested and optimized MP3 on.
Sonic656
If they have ignore a whole genre with countless sub styles to say there codec is transparent at X bitrate & setting, Then It trash codec. MPEG-1 Audio Layer II wasn't tested either yet even with FHG's own encoders it outdid MP3 even at 192kb/s.
al2o3cr
Surely the entire audio industry will immediately see your obvious genius and do what you want. /s
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pwg
Initial release: 6 December 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3)

Given its age, it has held up remarkably well. You've probably simply found a particular composition that it is just not suited for. But it would have been impossible for Fraunhofer to test against all possible music compositions.

UmYeahNo
MP3: "On 7 July 1994, the Fraunhofer Society released the first software MP3 encoder, called l3enc." [0]

Opus 1.3: "libopus 1.3 was released on October 18, 2018" [1]

I feel like this is like asking "Why didn't Intel realize how flawed 8086 processor was, the Mac M1 makes the x86 look like a joke."

MP3 is so much older than Opus 1.3 hardly a fair comparison to expect 1991 tech to anticipate 2018's music styles, dynamic range, processing power, etc...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Fraunhofer_example_impleme...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#1.3