Go FLAC or go home.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
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.
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.
I would disagree with this. It isn’t really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I’ve noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
It’s all about the 64kbps .wma’s. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
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
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG’s OSTs and Apple’s iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple’s music subscription, as it is DRM’d.
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.
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.
The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac
Am I too FLAC to get these joke?
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don’t like corporations deciding what I’m allowed to enjoy.
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.
*torrents syndrome
Y’know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries… but they’re not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
My library is competing with Spotify.
.flac or bust
Don’t forget about .ape.
Please do forget about .ape. Proprietary, obscure format. Only advantage is that under some circumstances it can get you higher compression rates than flac. But it’s way more resource intensive to decode so that advantage is really more theoretical. Use flac, forget ape.
It’s harder to find (legal) downloadable music anymore too. 7Digital has been pretty alright for me, but I just stopped bothering with Spotify and Pandora and such. Youtube used to be great for discovery until they started mega cracking down on adblock again.
How often people are just getting rug-pulled left and right by streaming services is ridiculous.
Uh, yes, Youtube trying to Anti-Adblock… pops up once or twice a year, then I click on “Update uBlock” and be done with it…
FLAC master race check in.
FLAC on a NAS for self-hosted streaming.
I don’t really notice a difference it just takes up storage
You’d probably notice it with better audio gear.
Absolutely.
I had gone awhile without buying any albums on cd. Icky Thump by the White Stripes came out, I downloaded it and had been jamming it in the car every day.
I took a friend out shopping and seen a copy and thought, “You know what? I want the album art.”
I took my burned cd out of the player and put the actual release on there.
“Boodoodwiddle dah boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, bah dah bow!!!”
I couldn’t believe how powerful it sounded.
I only fucked with flac after that.
