Go FLAC or go home.
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don't prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don't avoid non-lossless albums either.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It's just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it's stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
Yeah, but that argument was compelling in 2005.
With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn't matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.
And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.
So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.
file size absolutely matters when you have thousands of songs lol, my music is a significant chunk of my phone's SD card capacity
That's why you should transcode to 200 or even 160 kbps for your phone.
But the master archive should be in flac if possible.
A 2 TB disk is less than $100 nowadays.
In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.
FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Yeah, this isn’t how that works.
“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.
You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It's a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
You mean there's more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I'm patient
I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
Watch out, it's a slippery slope... You start with a raspberry pi and a USB drive, you end up with a virtualization server and a zfs pool
The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac
The owner of the mansion they're having the party in: wav
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you're a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
I believe they've just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
To all the friends I never met:
I am running a homeserver with all my music, videos, books, articles, source, etc. here is how you do it↓
- get a old desktop computer
- install gnu/linux on it
- connect it to your router through ethernet
- install nextcloud
- install samba, create a smb partition on your new server
- mount the drive into your regular computer, phone, laptop, tv. smart-stereo.
- enjoy all your music from anywhere without cluttering your devices with music, movies or books, or articles, or , or, or
- I usually just use vlc to access any media on my smb share :D just works
- get the nextcloud-client for phone and your other devices and access your smb share that way if you like and upload fotos, video or music there. :D
Thank me later (also if you use ALL linux devices you can skip the smb part and just use netdriv
I'm surprised more folks on here don't like FLAC.. it fits better 😉
You cant stream it on data connection without obliterating your data cap and battery.
You cant simply load FLACs onto your phone it kills the free storage in the blink of an eye. Try loading 1000 FLACs vs MP3s.
And moreover, there is a debatable gain or quality when you are on mobile with mobile gears/earphones.
MP3s fit in the middle of all restrictions.
I like FLACs, of course, but I can see why people just prefer MP3s
I just don't hear any difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3 and flac. If you manage a large library, 10x smaller matters a lot, it's faster to transfer, easier to share on the web, space still costs money.
Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don't have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I've found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I've never been for bands I never would have found. It's more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.
MULLVAD! Wireguard configuration! Quantum resistant encryption! Multi-hop!
ProtonVPN!
Qbittorrent!
Sorry...there I go again with my Tourette's syndrome, spouting off the names of random software.
You should never pirate things! How are billionaires supposed to afford their colossal mansions on huge plots of land in the most expensive areas of the world if we pirate things?!
Billionaires had to step on and fuck over so many people to get where they are now! If we pirate things, they won't be able to afford their platinum toilets covered in diamonds! Or their $50,000 watches. or their $5000 designer suits that they wear once and throw away every day.
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn't actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
I don't deserve respect, it was the style at the time and i just kinda never stopped doing it.
Closing in on 200Gb of mp3 where i listen to the same 5 on repeat
It's been more than 25 years of accumulating mp3, editing and cleaning my libraries, upgrading to flac, etc. Now going strong at around 600gb of music.
Ive done the library management before. For the moment I'm still content with paying for spotify premium. I bet they will raise their prices in the future to make me rethink that, but for now i enjoy not having to manage a huge collection and my spotify recommendations arent terrible yet.
I was the kid ripping CD's not to MP3 but to ogg Vorbis
Because - open source baby! 🥹😅
Y'know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries.... but they're not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
"managing" isn't exactly the right word for whatever the fuck I'm doing
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don't like corporations deciding what I'm allowed to enjoy.
My journey to mp3s was weird. Phones were already becoming common in high school but I wanted a music player after using the in-game ipod in Metal Gear Solid 4. But iPod classics were expensive and weren't drag and drop. Being on flights and in areas with spotty reception really made me see the value of portable offline music. No ads, no buffering, and no drain on my phone battery.
Yup I still use a standalone player. I got a Sony Walkman NWZ-385 first which was 8GB. It has the best ui I've seen on a player and I still have it. But now I moved on to a Sandisc with a 256GB micro sd card. Before I had to pick and choose but now I can have hours long files just dropped in no prob. And I have it a copy of everything on my pc hard drive.
Opus is the best. Anyone still using mp3s in 2023 is living in the past. Some users can still hear a difference between 256kbit/s mp3 audio and uncompressed audio while Opus reaches transparency at about 120kbit/s.
In the realm of compression transparency is when the compressed medium is indistinguishable from the source audio by a human
I still buy music CDs and rip them to mp3s. Then I sync my Music collection to the various devices. I even sync it to a USB stick that plugs into the car. I don't have Spotify; I have Strawberry.
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