mp3's are the jpeg of the audio world. Maximum compatibility with any and all ancient electronics, and now totally free. I don't think we'll ever be rid of it. And really that's fine because at high bitrate mp3 is very usable and mp3 does a great job at what it does like jpeg does: it dramatically reduces the data size compared to raw (wav to mp3 savings is dramatically greater than mp3 to any other audio format savings).
Where "very usable" == "sounds exactly the same as lossless", unless there's some double blind study showing that people can reliably tell the difference between v0/320 mp3's and lossless... I've never seen one.
As a distribution format for mixed-down music that will be consumed from a portable device's internal storage, 320kb/s VBR is great.
There's some unfortunate irony in that we just got out from under the MP3 patents, which mean that MP3 encoders can finally get mainlined and won't require screwing around like we're all gotten used to for a decade+ (having to add some extra repo to your apt.sources or equivalent file, etc.), but at the same time the consumption patterns of music have shifted again, away from portable devices with high-density storage like iPods, and towards streaming particularly over cell-data networks.
There is an argument, although I do not like some of its conclusions, that some of the newer codecs are preferable to MP3 if you are working within <96kb/s for a stereo signal so that you can put it over a 3G connection or something. MP3 starts to sound audibly bad at lower bitrates, depending on what you're listening to.
My cellphone today is a much more powerful device than my 2007 iPod, but doesn't have nearly the same amount of available onboard storage (and what storage it does have is split between music and photos and software and other stuff). So the tradeoffs that make for an ideal codec choice on the iPod aren't clearly great on the phone.
IMO, this is an argument for keeping your personal music collection in an uncompressed/losslessly-compressed format, so that you can recompress it easily based on how it's actually going to be used.
The bigger the system is, the noticeable the difference is. It's the same as displaying jpgs versus analog images on a large projector. The difference is much more noticeable with the audio! But yeah, this is a more of an analog versus digital debate, rather than comparing digital formats. However lossless is called lossless for a reason.
>In the early days, an mp3 could easily be some 64k cbr shite.
When I was a teenager my first MP3 player (RCA Lyra) came with one 32 MB CompactFlash card. I cut the bitrate down far enough to fit 4 or 5 full albums on that at once. It sounded like absolute garbage but I was the only kid who could fit that much music in my pocket.
I tell this story because I'm still impressed by what MP3s can do after so much time.
One downside to MP3s is that it's not possible (or maybe not always possible, or not easily possible) to prevent silence from being added to the beginning and/or end of the audio. This complicates things like gapless playback or loops. It also complicates using audio where a high level of precision is required (e.g. "I want this widget to appear exactly half a second into this audio").
Ogg Vorbis is superior in every way, and I really don't care about ancient electronics, so I'm perfectly happy encoding all my music into .ogg since all my devices, including my car, are compatible with it.
The only way it's not superior is compatibility with ancient electronics, just like I said before. What's the problem? Why should I care about playing my music on 15-year-old hardware? I don't have any such hardware any more, so I really don't care about it. In fact, 10+ years ago when I still had a portable music player, I had an iRiver H340. Even it played my Oggs!! So where are these shitty players that can't play Oggs? I've never had one. And these days, they don't seem to exist. My Android phone plays them just fine, out of the box. My car even plays them right off a USB thumb drive. And of course my computer plays them easily. So again, why should I give two shits about compatibility with some ancient devices that I don't have, and likely not many other people do either?
Do you only use software that'll run on Windows 2000?
If you want to buy some shitty portable music player that can't handle proper open-source file formats, that's your choice. I've had a bunch of devices from all sorts of other, better manufacturers that ALL supported Oggs.
If all English speakers also spoke Loglan, except for the tiny portion of the population that's over 100 years old, then your analogy would make sense.
