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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Who needs MP3 in 2024? Retrocomputing does! So a really lightweight YouTube client capable of running on Windows 95 and/or 486-class machines producing MP3 output would make a really great sense. Can this? For everyone else there are AAC and OPUS.

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I still use an iPod with Rockbox firmware as my everyday music player so I also still need mp3s :3

All iPods supported AAC and I imagine alternative firmware adds opus support, so you can just grab the original audio files from YouTube instead of converting them to MP3.

RockBox added OPUS support ages ago. Absolutely no need to perform lossy-to-lossy conversion when you can just grab and use the opus stream.

I installed Rockbox on iPod specifically to play Opus.

As long as there’s no mp3directcut https://mpesch3.de/) clone for Opus, the format lacks non-destructive fast editing. And while it can cut and edit raw aac, it works a lot better with mp3.

Non destructive editing is more important with the new formats, because they compress to smaller files and cause greater problems when you unpack and recompress them.

This is why mp3 still is a good format for 2024.

I always use MP3 since it's the most compatible. Doesn't make a difference for my hearing and I can use it anywhere. E.g. some car radios still have problems with other formats. Saying "who needs this" is very dismissive.

This is exactly what the poster you're answering to said.

No, the poster said it's good for retrocomputing, implying MP3 is outdated and no one should be using it normally.

Something in between. I actually thought of all the vintage tech (I'm a huge fan of) but car audios (which can be routinely used by non-geeks who generally use more or less modern tech for everything else) specifically didn't come into my mind.

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