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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

Just go lossless. A huge music collection now is, what, 300-500GB in FLAC? That's on the order of 1500-2000 albums, if I've done my orders of magnitude right (about 300MB/album in FLAC).

I re-ripped my CD collection a few years back, and after pondering formats, I realized that for listening around the property, FLAC is perfect (Plex handles it, PlexAmp is nice). And if I really want to stuff more stuff on a smaller drive for the car or something, I can transcode down from FLAC and still have the lossless originals.

It's the same reason my DVD rips from our collection are just MakeMKV wrapping of the original MPEG2. Yeah, I could save some space by transcoding... but disk is cheap, and it's just not worth the hassle. Rip to lossless and go from there.

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Depends what you're playing from. I don't have a terabyte of storage on my phone and I'd like to store more than just audio books and music. If you've got a desktop with magnetic storage then sure.

I'd also be curious if you can tell the difference between a 128 kbps Opus and a lossless flac file (in a blind test of course, easy way to test yourself: cp a.flac $RANDOM.flac; cp a.opus $RANDOM.opus; play both with cvlc or something, make your guess, then look at the file size to get the result, repeat at least five times). I could see the argument for having a lossless copy somewhere, just in case you get better audio playback equipment in the future, but for a hot copy (especially on a mobile device) I'm not sure flac is beneficial.

I agree. I was using almost entirely lossless until five years ago or so, when I did some ABX tests (there's a good foobar plugin for those interested) and realised that 256+ kbps LAME was indistinguishable from lossless 24/96 to my ears -- even when actively comparing the two in a quiet room, which obviously is very different to just listening casually while commuting etc.

I kept the lossless files for archival purposes but everything on my phone/laptop is ~320 LAME VBR.

That said, soon after that I switched to Spotify and only rarely listen to my own files now. The convenience and ability to discover new music just doesn't compare.

I suspect that 192k vorbis and 128k opus would also be transparent for you as well (unless you listen to techno/industrial and have really good speakers). Might save you a bit of space.

Yeah that's likely true. I had chosen MP3 for reasons of total compatability and 'good enough' compression, but it seems like almost all music players have good support for those formats as well. Maybe at some point I'll switch over.

MP3 also has some fundamental problems when dealing with short sharp sounds (e.g. castanets), which have been fixed in subsequent audio codec generations such as AAC, Vorbis or Opus.

This also applies to other hardware. Even if you had a terabyte on your phone, no point to lossless if you proceed to play it with cheap earplugs. Not sure if audio controllers in phones are a big influence nowadays.

I use lossless because why not. I have plenty of space on my computer. And if I really like an album that would like to listen on the go, I transcode it to a lossy version (aac)

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