> MP3 was synonymous with digital music in most of our minds for so long
I think this is probably the main reason for mp3's stickiness.
> second, even if modern equipment handles all the better codecs, a lot of us still have memories of times it didn't in the past.
Sure, and your dvd players didn't always handle x264. Things change :). It's been probably 10 years since new audio hardware had trouble with non-mp3 media.
> Third, I think some of the tooling around metadata is not as developed or ubiquitous for, say, an ogg container. There are ogg comments, but ID3 is better supported.
Granted, I think ogg will have worse support for equipment. However, I'd expect that aac in m4a will end up with the same level of support as mp3s do today simply because it's a lot more common than opus (and older).
> MP3 is no great sin.
It's not, I just don't like seeing generally superior tech getting sidelined because the inferior tech is more familiar. Perhaps that's a sin on my part :). I admit it probably doesn't ultimately matter if your music is 1MB vs 2MB.
I've written code to parse metadata out of an M4A. I'm sure Apple does a good job of it given they've done that in iTunes for 20+ years, but it's a lot less documented and straightforward than ID3v2, as imperfect and hacky as that format is. As a result, I can pretty trivially edit ID3 from a shell script, but dealing with M4A metadata still feels like a black box.
(After typing that, I realize that calling it a "black box" is a pretty good pun on MP4 box formats..)
My car's radio supports both MP3 and AAC-in-MPEG4, but with the latter it occasionally has trouble reading the metadata, though I haven't really figured out why exactly that might be.
I think this is probably the main reason for mp3's stickiness.
> second, even if modern equipment handles all the better codecs, a lot of us still have memories of times it didn't in the past.
Sure, and your dvd players didn't always handle x264. Things change :). It's been probably 10 years since new audio hardware had trouble with non-mp3 media.
> Third, I think some of the tooling around metadata is not as developed or ubiquitous for, say, an ogg container. There are ogg comments, but ID3 is better supported.
Granted, I think ogg will have worse support for equipment. However, I'd expect that aac in m4a will end up with the same level of support as mp3s do today simply because it's a lot more common than opus (and older).
> MP3 is no great sin.
It's not, I just don't like seeing generally superior tech getting sidelined because the inferior tech is more familiar. Perhaps that's a sin on my part :). I admit it probably doesn't ultimately matter if your music is 1MB vs 2MB.