Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

My recommendation is keep FLAC archived on your pc or other external storage and use opus on your phone

FLAC can have metadata too. Not so for WAV files

Thanks for the information and table of contents to look at. I will maybe switch the content of my personal audio library for my Phone to Opus. Will just take some time for ffmpeg to convert it.

While it depends on a number of variables; such as your own personal preferences and quality of the audio hardware you're using; FLAC is indeed better. Given appropriate tuning and hardware, you don't need a trained ear to hear the difference.

It is however possible to prefer compressed music. In fact, I myself tend to be fine with anything down to 128kbps MP3 or comparable compression. That doesn't mean I do not notice it; but it's "tolerable" in quality. I grew up around the late stages of Analog FM radio; so anything that can manage to sound better than THAT is actually good! For reference you were lucky to pick up what is equivalent to a 96kbps MP3 if you had optimal signal strength and things very quickly devolved to a staticky 8kbps experience if you had very minimal signal.

For storing music on-the-go; I actually recommend considering 192kbps MP3 if you don't mind the "Lossy" sound and just wanna cram as much music as possible onto storage without it sounding absolutely terrible.

If "Lossy" is just not an acceptable option for your tender ears; I recommend Ogg Vorbis (Android & all of it's variants) at standard bitrates or AAC (Apple) depending on your mobile device OS.

If you're willing to carry around a limited library/playlist and want to emphasize quality; I can't recommend FLAC enough.

Don’t believe anyone trying to sell you on the idea that FLAC sounds better than an appropriately compressed (read: transparent) lossy format: Opus ~128-160kbps, MP3 ‘V0’ (~215kbps), MP3 320kbps, AAC ~150kbps.

Only partly true. If the rest of the chain is of decent quality (hi-res sound card, proper cables, quality headphones/speakers/monitors), then the difference between lossless and lossy is apparent to a trained ear. Especially the lack of dynamics and space is typical of lossy formats.

Personally, I never understood why I would want to listen to anything but lossless in the first place. I never really had to worry about storage space too much for my music to consider converting it to a lossy format. I am more of a user who likes to archive stuff; therefore, lossless and FLAC are the only future-proof ways if you want to listen to your files in the next 25 years or so.

Thanks I will give it a read. Never really knew were to look for it really much.

I mean I went from 60GB wav to 60GB Flac but now with more Music. With now 60GB more to use.

I'm archiving but also listening to them. I use navidrome as an audio server. But with Mobil internet it's like 1h waiting for 10s music.

I still have a SD slot. Just not in the mood to buy a 256GB SD Card and copy all and stuff.

I still have a SD slot. Just not in the mood to buy a 256GB SD Card and copy all and stuff.

I have one too. Too bad their battery life is very average and they only have 2 years of updates. Otherwise they would be almost the perfect phone!

Oh never heard of it. Could you give informations about the listening quality?

Unfortunately, it seems you have a really bad misconception as well.

Sorry, no, files (be it MP3 or FLAC or MP4 or whatever) do not degrade over time. Not one bit. Yes, storage devices do degrade and ultimately break down, but that does not result in MP3 files "losing 7 to 15 kbps per year". Digital files are like that—digital. They don't suffer the same degradation like vinyl where each playback damages the grooves and looses definition. Digital files are a bunch of zeros and ones (be it MP3 or FLAC or whatever) and it's either those bunch of numbers makes sense to the player (as in, it plays) or not (as in, the player shows an error saying it can't play the file).

What you have experienced as "degradation" probably isn't the result of files degrading over the years. See, when MP3 was invented, the early encoders produced relatively bad sound quality for a given bitrate. They just can't pack that much information into 128kbps without affecting the sound quality. Over the years, many countless improvements were made to MP3 compression technology, and modern software like LAME can produce really good sound quality even at relatively low bitrates. That makes old files encoded using old encoders sound worse than new files encoded using new encoders at the same bitrate.

MP3 doesn't even support 16kbps, so I can't imagine your storage device delicately removing bits from your MP3 files to reduce the bitrate without corrupting them, since storage devices can't even see the boundary between files—it only sees all the files as one huge string of numbers without any sense. Also, I can imagine your MP3 file shrinking in size every year if they do lose bits over time. Many filesystems also offer integrity checks on files, so your computer will alert you if something unintentional changes on your storage. Even some Linux filesystems will show an error if a single bit unexpectedly changes on one of your files.

Wherever you read that misconception, please don't believe it. Digital files are not affected by quality degradation, and it's either they play, or they don't play.

Hopefully you take this as a friendly message, and if this has been a joke and I've been whooshed, then you had me very well.

Had me in the first... third.

Should have stored them in the freezer. That's what I did, and I can still enjoy my 128kbps weird al mp3s from before y2k. Had a backup on CD in my attic, and tried it recently just for kicks... got an earful of actual mud. Took me a couple hours to get it all out of there with windex and qtips, but at least I can hear again.

Sorry man, they're too young to get it