[Kirby64]

> I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).

MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates either, and MP3s are if anything more popular among that community.

[kimixa]

> MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates

Neither does the human ear.

While there may benefits for intermediate representations during mastering/modification, for playback higher frequencies can only ever make things worse as it increases the chance of unintentional frequencies causing distortion etc.

And for those intermediate steps any lossy compression is probably a bad idea.

[Kirby64]

I agree with you, I’m just noting that this argument doesn’t hold because pirates (who listen, they don’t do mastering) basically only care about flac or mp3s. And mp3s are limited to 48k.