Question

What are the pros and cons of MP3 audio archives?

Answer 1

Was this in reference to literal audio archives? If so, I don't see any cons beside possible copyright infringement.

If you're talking about the codecs themselves, then I can do that.

Pros:

- Widespread acceptance. Supported in nearly all hardware devices, and continually adopted by newer ones.

- Faster decoding. Much more so than FLAC, Vorbis, etc.

- Relaxed licensing schedule.

Cons:

- Lower quality and efficiency than most modern codecs. (To be fair, never really noticed this one).

- Sometimes the maximum bitrate isn't enough.

- Pretty much void/unusable for high definition audio (higher than 48kHz).