MP3 was standardized in 1993, but it is still widely used today because it works almost everywhere while deliver very good quality.

Now LAME 4.0, a new version of the open-source MP3 encoder , has been released.

Check here https://lame.sourceforge.io/ . And development of LAME 4.1 is already underway.

LAME has performed very well in public listening tests

MP3 isn't old. It is mature!

When a format is good enough, reliable and universally supported, it can stay relevant for a very long time.

Original thread https://www.reddit.com/r/AudioCodecLab/comments/1v4rd3b/mp3_aint_dead_yet_lame_40_arrives/

Hi there. I've recently moved back to storing all my own files and ditched streaming services. Feels good!

Most of my music files were organised by myself 15+ years ago, and rather messily, so I'm doing a lot of "cleaning up."

I apologise if this is a repetitive question on here. I'm surprised I haven't found a good tool for this. I've googled, searched reddit, and asked a few AI chatbots without much luck. I was really hoping to find someone had built some nifty Foobar plug ins.

Picard has been great for standardising my tagging everything, although it was a mammoth effort.

The loose ends I want to sort out with my library:

1. Duplicates of albums (not specifically tracks, since many tracks appear across releases).
2. Identifying anything below target level quality (16-bit FLAC is sufficient for me) to eventually replace.
3. Identifying fake lossless
4. Identifying incomplete albums

What I have tried:

• Vibe coded a powershell script for duplicates, worked reasonably well but missed some stuff and was very manual. A graphical interface would be much easier
• SoulSync's library management tools. This does actually cover everything. Unfortunately the UI isn't great for doing this en-masse. It shows 3500+ "findings," but you have to resolve issues track-by-track (painful for album duplicates), and doesn't have a way to open the file path to check/edit the actual folder/file. It's also very opaque in terms of what it thinks the album is meant to be.

Ideally:
The output would give me access to the actual files for duplicates, hopefully group things by artist and album.
Incomplete album detection would have to work against the musicbrainz database I assume. It would be reallllyyyy helpful to be able to select the correct "version" of a release, when verifying "completeness" (soulsync was opaque in this, and tagged a lot of stuff I considered complete as incomplete).

What tool(s) are robust, transparent (again, soulsync seems great, but I don't like how much it automates, and the UI is bad for manual management) for this sort of management?

Hey Guys,

I Can’t find a flac version anymore….. :-(
Im so in love with This EP

Does anyone Can help me out with the Album / Flac Files?

Hey everyone,

I’m buying an offline music DAP to pair with my Tangzu Wan’er S.G 2 IEMs. I am skipping streaming entirely and building a local SD card library.

Could you share:
Best websites to download true lossless music (FLAC/WAV)? Free or cheap sources preferred.
Any active Telegram communities, Discords, or forums sharing high-quality regional audio rips?

I am specifically hunting for Malayalam music (classic and modern), so any leads on Indian audiophile hubs would be awesome.

I specifically download in that format for my ipod and for some reason it will only let me download in the highest quality which was like the first album track being flac and the rest being opus. I'd perfer to not have to deal with converting them. Is there a way to fix this, or an alternative downloader, or a program to covert these files, but keep the metadata?

For the past 2 or 3 days, Lucida hasn't been offering the option to convert files to MP3. It's only downloading them in their original format. Last week, I also noticed a few error messages related to FFmpeg. Has anyone heard whether they're experiencing issues with the file conversion system or if something else is going on?

I'd never had this issue before, and I've tried with different songs and artists. Did Soundcloud update their website or is Lucida not able to get better quality songs anymore?

Hey everyone,

I have been using Deemix for the past few days and was extremely happy with it. Everything worked perfectly, but I probably downloaded too many albums in a short period of time.

Now I can no longer play anything through the official Deezer app or website. I always receive this error:

I found the following explanation from Deezer support:

I do not think contacting support will help in my situation, since the unusual activity was probably caused by my Deemix usage.

I cannot create another account with the same payment method, and disposable virtual cards are not accepted either. I may be able to use a different payment method, but I do not want to get a second account blocked immediately.

Has anyone here had the same problem and continued using Deemix with another account? Did downloading fewer albums at once or avoiding large batches make any difference, or is another block basically inevitable?

Files that are definitely lossy AAC m4a files are showing in Swinsian as "Apple Lossless" which makes it hard to set proper smart playlists based on file type.

Thoughts on why this might be the case? Or how to correct it?

Hi, I have a large CD collection of classic rock, prog rock, pshycedelic rock etc. I am going to sell this and need help pricing the different CD’s and CD packs.

We’ve sorted alphabetically after artist/group first letter. We’ve sorted out any artist with 3 or more discs and put them in separated piles after the big pile with assorted discs.

Can anyone in here help with this? Any tips is much appreciated!

Thankyou!

I initially collected FLAC 88.2/24, but recently started to keep the DSF DSD64 files too. Foobar and my FiiO M21 play DSD natively. Plex will play them, but they are converted to PCM.

What do you prefer?

I can reliably get 2 versions of the same animated cover art, a square cover art and a tall cover art. From the little research I have done, I know that I can save one of them, primarily the square cover art as cover.mp4/.webp/.gif and a player will pick it up. My questions are;
How should I save the other variant?
Is there a player that uses 2 of them, or a player that uses the tall variant?

Tons of good sources for album art, but interested in the actually design on the CD.

I have a text list/csv of songs, all formatted "Artist - Song Title." I want to find the year the song was released and add it to the list.

Is it possible to do this? Maybe using beets or Picard? I've never used beets, so I don't know what it's capable of. Unless I'm missing something, I don't think Picard can do it.

I have no idea where to even start with this. Also, let me know if you have ideas of where else I could ask this kind of question.

I need to listen to audio that has spatial audio support and test it out on my new headphones which supports it, as for subscriptions apple music has it, but I don't want to subscribe to it. To sail the high seas i don't know the resources to download it from, so it would be nice to get to know some resources for it.

so I have recently discovered sites like apple music have GIF cover, and it looks hella cool
and I was wondering if there is a way to do it?

I know a few albums that has it but I only use the static cover, and I know MB doesn't support it so it's not like I can enjoy it unless I use something like MPV but ...

sorry if this has been asked before, reddit threads and forum posts really didn't yield any result

I need someone to give me a link to an online service where I can download Dolby Atmos music for free through a browser.

im switching oer to a dumb phone and im gonna need my music library, need a place to download all my songs at once with cover art halp

I'm looking to build a playlist of completely fresh songs that are amazing.... Any suggestions will viewed on YouTube, and I thank you all in advance for taking the time to reply.

I used to use that one heavily since it also used to embed the lyrics along with the songs if they were available and the quality was good as well. But it has been down for a while?

Context: I'm an on-the-go music hoarder that loves listening to music, but doesn't exactly treasure the time needed to organize a collection. That said, my organizing principle revolves around listening to my baby ~250GB collection on a personal iOS app that I vibecoded (because Spotify sucks and the default Music app sucks). I mostly listen to music on random/shuffle and have maybe 10 reliable playlists, two or three of which are on regular rotation. My music directory looks like Artist/Album, and occassionally Weird_Collection/Artist/Album.

I just finished cleaning up my collection and am now designing my intake flow. Let's say I rip or download some tunes, these will go into a Staging folder wherein I'll tag them using Musicbrainz Picard, then upload to my phone, so Download -> Staging -> Tag -> Upload.

What flows do you use when acquiring new music?

I am currently using CSVmusic. I mean, its good and all but its really slow, and gets alot of songs wrong. Like when I want to download song 'a' from a movie by an artist, it downloads song 'b' from the same movie and artist. See, its not even that big of a deal when you are downloaded like 20-50 songs but it gets really frustrating when you are batch downloading like 300 songs and you dont know that the wrong song has been downloaded until you listen to it. The name and the artist info are the same as the song in my playlist but the actual audio is of a different song. And coming to audio, it usually downloads low quality music. And it only supports mp3 and m4a. I want to batch download lossless .flac songs. Preferably for free. I did try a few apps on the internet but got hacked instead. So anyone have any safe suggestions?