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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

This guy overthought it... use Plex, so you can stream it. Don't be syncing large folders of files everywhere with git. And if you don't like Plex, there's a half dozen other comparable software titles that will stream audio.

As for "smaller files" fuck that shit. For the longest time, I went with 320kbps mp3s. I was limited in the space I could dedicate to music (a few hundred gigabytes). But now? Storage is only cheaper. Get FLAC for everything. And the cloud? I think that's called "someone else's computer" or so I've heard. Stream/sync it from home.

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Yup. I use beets.io to push downloaded, tagged FLACs to my NAS and then Plexamp for music streaming.

What's that got over MusicBrainz Picard, out of curiosity?

it can detect duplicates in your collection because it maintains a small database of what it's seen. Great for ingesting the big pile and cleaning up

I was just on a CLI kick when I discovered it. At this point it’s inertia and knowing the quirks quite well.

You won't hear a difference between FLAC and 320kbps encoded MP3 99% of the time, so why waste 10x more space for a FLAC?

Storage is cheap. Plus you might want/need to re-encode to another format down the line and any lossless format is better as the master copy.

Don't forget also that re-encoding often happens with wireless streaming technologies such as Bluetooth. The effects of this are much less well studied. Bluetooth has more chance of sounding fine with a lossless source like FLAC.

Agreed - I have my collection encoded in Opus on my phone's SD card.

Tempted to do the same for my in-home setup to lock the sample rate at 48KHz - my tired old home server struggles to down-sample the higher resolution FLACs that I have before throwing it to SnapCast.

I’ve gone back and forth on the question but with storage costs as they are I always have a Source of Truth in FLAC.

For listening I figure I’ve spent so much $$ on my setup I’d be dumb not to ensure the source is not perfect too - for free.

While true... I figured out how little I was saving by not doing FLAC. And there wasn't a point in saving that storage. I've got plenty, and that's with 5 bays still empty in the Synology.

I only wish I could do the same with video.

One day you might want to transcode - compression artifacts may well not be audible in normal use, different compression algorithms drop different bits though and so the result of transcoding between compressed formats is quite often an audible (even to my distinctly non-golden ears) loss of quality. Thus FLAC (as a reliable lossless format) - or even WAV (I chose to take the 2:1, 3:1 compression of FLAC over WAV personally).

10x? More like 2-3x

Besides the fact that storage is cheap, FLAC has a more ample metadata model than MP3 and I'm already used to working with the toolchain for that metadata.

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