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Having built a rather large CD collection (over the decades since there were like 5 albums available on CD), eventually I used a rack of old computers to rip th

by zh3 3y ago

Having built a rather large CD collection (over the decades since there were like 5 albums available on CD), eventually I used a rack of old computers to rip them all to FLAC - storage cost is way less than the original CD cost. Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC (from Bandcamp etc.). Storage keeps getting cheaper, bandwidth is cheap, and my bet was always the price of both will keep decreasing to where it's not worth the quality/transcoding issues of using any lossy format. It's now pretty much at the point where it's possible to stream lossless audio from the home server to whereever I happen to be (with a backup of an MP3 player with a big SD card whenever there isn't bandwidth).

JohnFen 3y ago
> Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC Yes! I only buy music on CD or FLAC. Nothing else is good in the long term. Sadly, when I first digitized my music collection around 1995, I didn't have that foresight and encoded pretty much everything as MP3s, mostly at 192kbps. And they sound poor enough to irritate me now. My collection was large then (and is even larger now), and I still haven't finished the project of digging those old CDs out to encode them as FLAC.
__david__ 3y ago
That's kind of where I am as well. I initially ripped my CD collection to flac in around 1999 or 2000ish. Since then I've only added CDs I've bought or flacs I've purchased to this "main" archive (I have side areas where things got acquired through less than legal ways). My main archive is roughly 500 GB. Since I use Apple stuff, I have a script that will transcode it to AAC and copy it to my laptop where I have keep this (annoying) duplicate copy (80GB). Apple Music then syncs that stuff to its cloud. I used to use Subsonic on my phone to listen to my music directly, but Apple Music is so nice since it seamlessly merges my main library with its streaming stuff. Nowadays I seem to use Apple Music for like 90% of my "discovery". And I still slowly buy up songs that end up making the cut. I'd like to transcode to Apple Lossless and have _that_ in the Apple Music cloud instead of AACs but I don't want 500 GB of music on my laptop. Somehow I can forgive 80 GB, but 6x that crosses my line… Perhaps I could use a mounted network share as my iTunes library, but I suspect iTunes won't be happy when part of the backing store constantly goes away and comes back later.

by zh3 3y ago

JohnFen 3y ago

> Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC Yes! I only buy music on CD or FLAC. Nothing else is good in the long term. Sadly, when I first digitized my music collection around 1995, I didn't have that foresight and encoded pretty much everything as MP3s, mostly at 192kbps. And they sound poor enough to irritate me now. My collection was large then (and is even larger now), and I still haven't finished the project of digging those old CDs out to encode them as FLAC.

__david__ 3y ago

That's kind of where I am as well. I initially ripped my CD collection to flac in around 1999 or 2000ish. Since then I've only added CDs I've bought or flacs I've purchased to this "main" archive (I have side areas where things got acquired through less than legal ways). My main archive is roughly 500 GB. Since I use Apple stuff, I have a script that will transcode it to AAC and copy it to my laptop where I have keep this (annoying) duplicate copy (80GB). Apple Music then syncs that stuff to its cloud. I used to use Subsonic on my phone to listen to my music directly, but Apple Music is so nice since it seamlessly merges my main library with its streaming stuff. Nowadays I seem to use Apple Music for like 90% of my "discovery". And I still slowly buy up songs that end up making the cut. I'd like to transcode to Apple Lossless and have _that_ in the Apple Music cloud instead of AACs but I don't want 500 GB of music on my laptop. Somehow I can forgive 80 GB, but 6x that crosses my line… Perhaps I could use a mounted network share as my iTunes library, but I suspect iTunes won't be happy when part of the backing store constantly goes away and comes back later.