Compression quality, latest writing as of oct 2025

in short, in general

opus > aac > m4a > mp3

wav is superior to mp3 under any circumstance, mp3 just sounds muddy, like a low quality camcorder recording from the 1980s. the reason they chose 320kbps max, is back in the days you did simple downsampling from vhs to a 1/2^3 of it, that is, from 44khz 16bit stereo, to 22khz 8bit mono, which resulted in a bitrate of 360kbps. also note at low bitrates the quality can actually be reduces to 22khz, so not even vhs quality is prevalent. and with the increase in volume, the dynamic range inherent in 16bit is gone. thats why they removed meters on stereos in the later 1990s, because otherwise most of the time theyd just max out at 98-99%, and maybe people would have gotten suspicious and the volume war woulda have been won faster, if it was at all. youtube now only streams at 128kbps aac, for 4k its 150kbps opus which is still pathetic when the video stream is 20mbps, 1600x more bandwidth.

mp4 and aac and opus, can though sound just as good, very near, as wav. there is still no competition, and people dont listen to that much music. why not have it at pretty good quality if youre gonna bother your ears with it?

i am still researching processing 32bit to lossy and having it sound crisp. sites all seem to use lavf which is ffmpeg. which ive had some use in making simple image + sound videos. it is speedy, kdenlive is dogshit.

further, we can go

opus > aac > m4a > mp3 > mp3 encoded in the mid 1990s with faulty software

the encoder makes a large difference, so does the input file. in general though, if you dj or make music yourself, always save as 32bit float or higher. this way it sounds like vinyl or any analogue media, because that is always floating point. then youll get the "warmth" and "life" in the audio. if you save as 24bit then the bouncer reduces the quality by adding grain. then when you upload online, the audio site adds a limitier and compressor, then if you use bluetooth to stream it compresses it again, its just an infinite downgrade shitshow.

there is no excuse to not output in ableton in 394khz 32bit. this way it really sounds like a vinyl rip. and with compuregames being dosens of gigabytes, why cant a good album be that? you can enjoy music more than gaming. 20tb storage isnt that expensive. why not a 500gb album? or 50gb at least? why should it be LESS than in 1977 when the vhs standard was invented?