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Comment by mediocrejoker | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if another reason to prefer FLAC to MP3 is if you ever want to convert the MP3s to another lossy format (perhaps multiple times), is there a loss of quality associated with converting one lossy format to another multiple times?

It's nice to have a lossless format because you can always get lossy from it, but you can't do the opposite.

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That's more or less my argument. At least by my own standards, local storage space is really cheap, and the argument that I'd get 100,000 songs instead of 20,000 songs in the same amount of space just isn't that compelling.

Arguments about sound quality are in my experience largely doomed to failure; they usually end up devolving into meta-arguments about testing methodologies. (And invariably mocking audiophiles about $2000 USB cables or whatever, an argument I've grown really, really weary of seeing despite agreeing such things are profoundly silly.)

This is exactly my point of view also. I have 1,100+ CDs all of which are ripped to WAV[1]. In my car I have a duplicate copy of the collection converted to MP3s, as that's what my car audio system will read. When I used a portable music player, that was also MP3. However if I get a new car or a new music player, that prefers ogg, or some other codec, I can go back to my source library of WAVs and create a whole new set of lossy tracks in that new codec.

As far as people saying 320k MP3s vs Uncompressed WAV or FLACs sound no different, then they simply are not using good enough audio equipment. Throw into the mix the Hi-bitrate audio files that are becoming quite common (and you really can tell the difference between standard CD audio and hi-bitrate) and MP3s start to look completely unsuitable for long term music storage.

Also... don't get me started on the rubbish quality of streaming and DAB radio.

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[1] I started with WAV 10+ years ago, and kinda stuck with it - storage is cheap; I feel no need to change formats just yet.

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