I still use local media, including MP3s rather than streaming, so I can have more control of what I can see/hear/read, without the worry of it disappearing.

However I do find MP3s annoying when ripping a CD and trying to get gapless playback when ripping each CD track as a separate MP3 file. Remember many CDs go to a new track, but there is no interruption to the music.

The examples that come to mind are works like Pink Floyd – The Wall, or the third and forth movements of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.

There are some tweaks that can be done when ripping MP3s, but the MP3 player (whether software or hardware) has to support the unofficial “MP3 gapless playback” too.

So I’ve started ripping in other patent free formats that I don’t have to stuff around with, just to get gapless playback! I may be being pedantic, but those little interruptions when the next MP3 file in the playlist begins really annoy me. Maybe it’s just me, but I like to hear the “flow” of the music the way the artist intended!

Obviously there can be compatibility issues with some devices, but there is no reason I can’t rip/recode into MP3 too.

I agree with Gideon’s comment above, with the caveat that I’m a pedant and get annoyed at gaps in playback, between MP3 files. 🙂

IMHO, WinAmp 2.x had one of the best music player user interfaces ever – simple and straight forward. In twenty years, I too will be playing local files with WinAmp 2.

Well sort of:

I actually use the open source Audacious or QMMP players. Both support WinAmp 2 skins, so I run them with the original WinAmp 2 skin installed!

FYI: Heaps of WinAmp skins can be found on Archive.Org, including the original WinAmp 2 skin.

Both Audacious and QMMP run on Windows, Linux/BSD and MacOS; so even if you aren’t running Windows, you can still get your original WinAmp 2 fix and continue to “whip the llama’s arse” all these years later! 🙂

Now, I just need to get the Geiss and Milkdrop visualisation plugins working too! They were so fixating!

All the best.

I also have a media server that also has many mp3 files from 2 decades ago, it is almost a fossil of my existence in the computer industry.

mp3 is still widely used, because it still has excellent audio quality, mp3 320kpbs is a good substitute for those who do not want to deal with large FLAC files or need maximum compatibility.

AAC is the most widely used currently, it is the standard format for H264 and H265 movies, in addition to being the standard for the iTunes Store (Apple helped to spread AAC, so much so that it has its own encoder), but efforts are being made on Opus, an excellent audio codec that is 100% free and open source, and is the standard for the AV1 codec, which promises to replace the highly patented H264/65, just like AAC is.

With the world increasingly streaming, people make less use of offline media, mp3 still persists in the music collection of many

These days, I still use nothing but mp3s. I use Mediahuman to get files from YouTube because I never know when I song I want to hear might disappear, and I run my own radio station, so I’ve got to have control of my media.

20 years from now, I’ll still be using mp3s, played on Winamp, broadcast by ShoutCast. 🙂