History repeating itself

Everyone whose ears aren't full of wax knows that Walkman cassettes were vastly inferior in terms of quality to LPs or CDs. Access to specific tracks was also a problem. The one thing the format did have in its favour, though, was the fact that you could record it at home. (And, in fact, you generally ended up with a superior product if you did. A store-bought album on tape never sounded as good as a home-taped one. Even cheap stereos always recorded much better than they played back: most of the distortion was introduced in the final amp feeding the speakers.)

Hence, its success as a format. The killer advantage it *did* have over the other formats -- home recordability -- was enough to make up for the poor sound quality, general flimsiness and slow access.

MP3 has its own killer advantage: ubiquity. It was just There First. And while Ogg Vorbis is touting "patent-free" as an advantage, MP3 is also patent-free in most of the world (thanks to mathematical processes being excluded from the scope of patentability in many countries) anyway.

Transcoding between lossy formats is never a good idea. You can't recover what was lost by the first encoding, and you end up losing more in the second.

320kbps MP3s disappoint everyone

For people who want decent quality but need small files (e.g. limited capacity portable music player), they will have to re-encode to a smaller bitrate. Putting the same piece of audio through a lossy-compression algorithm twice sucks for quality. It's certainly not something anyone should pay money for.

For people who want the best quality, FLAC or some other lossless encoding format is better than 320kbps MP3. The MP3 will sound fine for most people, but if you're going to have large files anyway then why not go the distance and give us FLAC so that everyone is happy?

People can then batch-transcode to lower bitrates (for portable players) as they require and they will always have optimum quality that their target format can provide without any quality lost because of how it started off.

Of course, some people just want a 192kbps MP3 that they can play everywhere without using up a lot of space or having to be transcoded, and that should be an option as well. Options are important, as others have said, but the batch transcoding tools are so easy to use now that, download time aside, I don't see why anyone should dislike a FLAC download.

I am glad to see the music industry is slowing switching to DRM-free digital sales but I still won't buy any of their products online unless they give me the same quality, and adaptability when it comes to transcoding, that I get from buying a CD. So far it's only a few independent releases and labels which get this right.

It's also funny how the video industry is *increasing* quality, from VHS to DVD to the new high-definition formats, while the music industry seems intend on *decreasing* quality from CDs to gratuitously compressed downloads. I guess your average punter notices visual quality a lot easier than they notice audible quality.