Yeah I remember it took sometime before LAME came along and became good, but then AAC-LC took over. These days we really should just default to 256Kbps. My only wish is that AAC-LC QuickTime encoder to be open source.

Isn't Opus better than everything nowadays?

opus 160 vbr is basically the endgame for stereo listening. even 96-128 is transparent to the vast majority of people.

for archival and mastering you'd still use flac.

Ah yes, I was talking about lossy codecs. Plus it's an open format, so I'm wondering why we even use anything else. I guess hardware acceleration.

I use an audio player that is almost ten years old with Rockbox, and there is no noticeable difference in performance between decoding an MP3 and an Ogg Vorbis file.

Vorbis is very good, but managing the audio library, transcoding and transferring to the player are tedious and seem stuck in the 2000s.

Many of us have a large library of MP3s. The gain in quality and space from switching from MP3 V0 to Vorbis Q5 is negligible and does not justify the effort if you are not transcoding from FLAC.

Well, you definitely won't gain any quality if you're transcoding from a lossy format. You also wouldn't notice the difference in performance, but you might notice it in battery life.

If you're transcoding from FLAC, I think your best bet nowadays is just Opus, really.

The idea is rather that someone with a large FLAC library, who has already transcoded some of it to MP3 for listening on a portable player, has little interest in transcoding their FLAC files to Vorbis again. The battery life of an MP3 player, even with a ten-year-old battery, is still more than ten hours of continuous playback regardless of the format, which is more than enough.

The real limiting factor is the maximum size supported by microSD cards. If the player wasn't limited to 64GB, I wouldn't even bother transcoding.

Sure, there's no massive gain from replacing mp3 with Opus. For new files, though, mp3/Vorbis doesn't make sense any more.

It took more than 10 years for Vorbis support to become widespread. It will take a few more years before we can hope to play Opus easily everywhere.

We are at a stage where current solutions are just good enough in most case. Change is therefore becoming increasingly slow.

Even for music streaming, many services continue to use MP3 and AAC.

i still use a RockBox'd Sansa Clip+ with SuperMix 4 iems :)

For Internet? yes. But if you want your audio to be used by 99.99% of devices on earth than AAC-LC may be a better bet. At 256Kbps the difference is minimal is not non-existence to vast majority of users.