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.

Yeah, but that argument was compelling in 2005.

With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn’t matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.

And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.

So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.

In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.

FLAC 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.

Yeah, this isn’t how that works.

“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.

You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.

Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.

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

WAV and FLAC are both lossless, the reason people use FLAC is because WAV doesn’t (or didn’t) have good support for tags and FLAC has lossless file compression while WAV usually is uncompressed. There isn’t any sort of “upscaling” that is done.

Personally, I think a quality v0 or 320kb/s MP3 is perfectly fine for listening but I’m always going to prefer storing lossless audio so I can convert the files to whatever format I want/need. I’ve moved around between MP3, AAC, and Opus for different devices and if I didn’t have the FLAC files I would either have to redownload files or do lossy to lossy transcodes

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.

Jokes on you, I have thousands of dollars in listening equipment

The .wav part of your comment makes no sense, that is a lossless format, and it is used everywhere because it is dead simple to impliment

I totally agree, I was just perpetuating the meme

Sometimes it’s more about knowing you have the highest quality format than being able to hear the difference. An mp3 of a great sounding album with good dynamic range will always sound better than a FLAC of a shitty recording.

I think most people can train themselves to hear mp3 compression even on low quality gear by listening to comparisons of cymbal sounds. An experiment to prove this is to import a lossless track in to a DAW, export it to mp3, import the mp3 and invert the waveform, so playing back you will only hear the differences between the two tracks, ie only the sounds that the compression failed to accurately replicate, the compression artifacts. What you will be hearing with an mp3-320 is a sort of muddy static sound whenever the cymbals hit, blended with whatever other vocals or instruments overlapped with that frequency. This doesn’t mean that when you only hear the mp3 it will automatically sound bad or noticeably worse, but it proves there is an audible difference in the character of certain sounds that can be heard even on bad gear.

Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.

Just about all music is rendered to uncompressed .wav

Anything else is just some inferior transcoding /s

But also not /s because it’s accurate, just dumb.

Nah this is bullshit. Even on my $100 edifer speakers you can easily tell the difference.

Type of music matters though. For metal flac is totally worth it. With ambient music you aren’t going to hear a difference obviously.

Do you know a reliable tracker? I have lidarr set up to find lossless versions, but it’s pretty terrible at it.

Look for the Redtopia torrent. About 6tb of flac albums and another half terabyte of .mp3s

Where does one begin to find flac? I am taking the first steps beyond “finding a movie to play for free”

This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.

looks at his 42TB NAS

Don’t forget Limewire and Kazaa

I’m still shuffling some of those.

A 1TB SD card costs the same as a single vinyl LP right now.

It’s not even a concern.

However, I have a box of CDs that I ripped to 96kbps Vorbis in the early 2000s, and I think this time I’ll go straight to FLAC. Plex will transcode to the flavour-of-the-month codec on the fly when listening with limited bandwidth.

Imagine stroring WAVs

Watch out, it’s a slippery slope… You start with a raspberry pi and a USB drive, you end up with a virtualization server and a zfs pool

Same for me. I already have SBC with 64gb USB stick, but I could use more. Oh, and I want sailing hat too.

if you have an android phone, check out InnerTune on F-Droid. Youtube music client, native UI, no fees, lets you download music.

You know, I considered “fixing” that before hitting reply, but I figured the overall sentiment of my comment would make its way through.

I used a check and an x, to represent positive and negative. I could have gone with ➕ / ➖, so that’s on me.

It’s only a friendly comment, why you have to be mad?

I salute your commitment to the audio jack. I no longer have that luxury, but it is what it is, and I love my phone despite that glaring flaw. Wish it had an FM receiver too, but oh well.

If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.

Amen to that. I’ve got my weird guilty pleasures that I go to occasionally and there’s no reason anyone else needs to know why I listen to a couple of specific dubstep songs as often as I do. If that theoretical information ever got leaked, would it even matter? Probably not, but I’m able to enjoy the music more if I can listen in my own world with no strings attached.

Had a first Gen ipod permanently in my car from 2011 to just last year. Only took it out because head unit died and I put the factory one back in. iPod still works

The head unit in my car is so old it still has a dedicated 30 pin iPod cable that you’re meant to run out to your glovebox. I don’t do that, though. It has an SD card slot (full size) and also a USB port. And it still has a physical volume knob, too. I just chunk a flash drive into it.

I mean… That’s not immediate, but it’s close depending on the music and it’s availability

I used to be hot shit back in the day when I could run a BitTorrent client anywhere on my Nokia N900. Nowadays anyone can do it.

I’m very new to Linux so I’ll have to look up what that’s all about. Got Mint on dual-boot, but I keep slipping back into Win10 because it’s easier sticking with what you know, you know?

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Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop.

It’s a bit spam-like, but I’m going to write something about this separately despite having replied about a different item previously.

I’m technical so it has to be taken with a grain of salt but umm:

1. Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.

2. Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.

3. There are an abundance of options for streaming music, it’s (almost of course) easier and with more available choice than running your own Plex server which millions of people do. Hell, if you like plex you can just use its music app.

4. Of course you have to have a computer on in order to stream to yourself. I have a NUC (to counterpoint your “large energy bill” point) I use for the purpose of Plex and music streaming. But at least the music you like will stay there even as artists fight with various streaming services or try to start their own to get market share via exclusivity. It’s all still there, because in a very real way you actually have the music.

5. Your Internet does not have to be great to stream music. Some of us older fucks remember RealAudio. We literally streamed audio via dial-up modem. Aside from that, many streaming software packages including the one I use have an ability to locally cache what you’re listening to. I can listen to anything I’ve recently listened to on an airplane without preparing because it has an offline mode.

To each their own, but Spotify isn’t for me for a large number of reasons.

No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have

I haven’t used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There’s not really much to them other than “people who liked X tend to like Y” or “here’s something that sounds similar to an artist you like”. It’s discovery sure, but it’s discovery on autopilot. It’ll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.

I usually don’t want something “similar to…X” when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I’ve found probably a dozen.

All valid points, and I’m glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn’t nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I’m fine with my methods since they’ve never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I’m looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let’s just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).

I’m fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don’t need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it’s not without its merits. Though if you’re ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don’t feel like picking anything I’ll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.

I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don’t make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.

I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I’m perfectly content with that. It’s great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.

I feel like most of these points aren’t an issue if you have a dedicated mp3 player like an iPod… especially if you’ve been maintaining it for years.

Being able to pick songs

Christ

Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.

The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It’s exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.

and scrub through the song and rewind

And being able to look at what’s on a playlist.

Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.

Why would free users expect more stuff for free lol. If that’s Spotify’s biggest complaint then you know they’re doing pretty good.

Duh. Ver 11? 17? Can’t remember

Milkdrop.