Plex. I’ve had my whole personal collection available to stream for a long time now.

I only waste space with downloaded tracks if I know my drive is going to take me offline.

Store the original library as FLAC, then transcode on-the-fly (or once if you don’t want to use something like Navidrome or Jellyfin).

Have you ever used Bandcamp before?

but you could just throw away your car and build an open source car from source! isn’t that better than using… MP3!!!

/j

A teacher in my highschool (~16 years ago) “demonstrated” that lossless and mp3 are indistinguishable by playing the same song in different formats… On 10€ pc speakers

The main benefit to lossless is for archival purposes. I can transcode to any format (such as on mobile) without generational quality loss.

And it means if a better lossy format comes out in the future, I can use that without issue.

Well they have the skulls on them. They must be good! People wouldn’t have died for them otherwise! Duh!!!

If you are using the files played back at different tempos or keyshifted, the difference between lossy and lossless is a lot more apparent. For standard playback at normal pitch, mp3 is just fine.

A family member is an audio engineer (now also a producer) who owns a good recording studio, and we’ve A/B tested lossy vs lossless on good equipment. He hears things that I don’t, my ear is somewhat untrained. But at mp3 bitrates below 320, I can hear compression artifacts, especially in percussion instruments and acoustic guitar. But if you’re listening in your car or while wearing Bluetooth earbuds while you’re out walking, you probably won’t notice unless the mp3 bitrate is really dismal.

I am under 30, and I have interacted with music files.

edit: I don’t know about where you live, but I am definitely not the exception.

I hear you for sure. I very much prefer local software and saved files local as well. The problem is there’s more money to be made doing it the other way. Unless it’s FOSS you can pretty much count on the company to follow the money.

I wouldn’t expect most users to understand how to use it, but has there not been a tiktok downloader made yet? If not that’s a good opportunity for someone looking for a project.

I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.

The original Macintosh filesystem was flat, and according to WP, used for about two years around the mid-1980s. I don’t think I’ve ever used it, personally.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System

MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.

They switched to a new, hierarchical filesystem, HFS, pretty soon.

I thought that Apple ProDOS’s file system – late 1970s to early 1980s – was also flat, from memory. It looks like it was at one point, though they added hierarchical support to it later:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS

ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk’s storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128 KB or more of memory.

Looks like FAT, used by MS-DOS, early 1980s, also started out flat-file, then added hierarchical support:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

The BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) was introduced with PC DOS 2.0 as well, and this version also added read-only, archive, volume label, and directory attribute bits for hierarchical sub-directories.[24]

I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories),

That is true for MS-DOS 1.0. But Unix had a tree structured directory system from the very beginning (early 1970s). And the directory listing command “ls” was basically the same in the first Unix 50 years ago as it is in modern Linux.

Even university students studying computer science don’t have this basic knowledge anymore.

First people didn’t really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90’s when I was in school, we had a few school years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just “know” computers (“digital native” and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.

And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don’t know how to use computers.

@dustyData Oh my gosh. I see this every single day at work. So many people have no idea where any of their documents are saved, until they can’t find them. I’ll be honest, I use a lot of streaming services for music as well, but I think I might actually go back to simply buying music. Who knows. Call me old-fashioned and only 35 years old, but I still see a point in local storage in traditional desktop type software. There’s not enough of it around here.

Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have familiarity with the concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.

But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.

Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like scp from there. A file manager. Open local video files in mpv or in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve a music player that can browse the filesystem. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.

But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software. Not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network. I’m not sure that the official YouTube app lets one actually save video files for offline viewing, come to think of it.

I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the file:// URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale).

Apple broke metadata compatibility with a recent update. The podcast producer I know with an explicit AAC feed decided to just redirect to the MP3 feed. Unrelated to that, they also increased the MP3 bitrate for better audio quality. The increased file size doesn’t really matter that much compared to 15 years ago and people without unlimited data can just set their automated syncs to WiFi only.

So not a much different experience than Spotify

I read the manual for my cars radio. It has a max file size limit of like 256 songs or so per folder. But it can also accept 256 folders.

So if your cars is anything like mine you can probably play your songs just by splitting them up into more folders.

The randomizing n my Focus ST is good, but when I tell it to shuffle play it always starts with 1 of 2 different songs, every time.

Yeah WTF is up with that? My car does the same thing with a USB drive full of songs. It will literally play the same “shuffled” sequence over and over every time you drive. I have to take out the drive and change the files on it sometimes to make it actually Shuffle the songs’ order and that’s too much BS

2013 Ford, but I know they shared some technology for a while.

.

I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.

Unreal Tournament also used Vorbis starting from either 2003 or 2004.

It’s just one of those things where once you hear the difference you can’t go back. It’s sort of the difference between a 360p vs 1440p youtube video. The compression artifacts make the music sound so artifical to me. I don’t really know how to describe it. But yes, there is a considerable increase in file size. For me it’s a non issue because I have my music collection on an 8tb hdd. Though I wish phones still had micro sd slots so I could take them with me. My music collection is at 1.2 tb I think. I’m not trying to be an elitist asshole here. I’m just sharing my experience.

Yeah only the most popular formats are guaranteed support sadly. Support seems to be relegated to formats that are 20+ years old.

Edit: Just realized vorbis is 24 years old. Nevermind lol.

For Flac you have digital market places and CDs you can obtain from store fronts and private sellers like flea markets or shops like ebay or discogs.

Or torrents and DDL.

Thanks, it certainly looks useful.

I use a combination of mp3s and opus primarily but I can’t remember if opus is the open format ogg or not.

Opus is better in every way

Except ubiquitousness.

I can play an MP3 on any digital audio device made in the last 20 years.

Is it definitely the MP3 format at fault here? Was your MP3 from an official source or could it have been from a faulty source or improperly transcoded?

Could it be the sound system? Most people seem to prefer the convenience of Bluetooth, ubiquitous small speakers, and maybe that’s usually the limiting factor.

I stopped trying to keep up with a good sound system when my little ones decided to stuff matchbox cars into the port on my subwoofer. However I do a little set up from Bluetooth with AirTunes/Sonos, so I don’t know if the difference would be apparent. My car is by far my best sound system

iPhones use m4a these days for their native music app.

Youtube Music doesn’t just serve the audio from a video.

Yes it does. You don’t even need to take my word for it. Look up any song by any artist and find their official video for that song. Take this one as an example: youtu.be/kPa7bsKwL-c

Analyze it with yt-dlp or something similar;

249 webm  audio only      2 │    1.51MiB    50k https │ audio only           opus        50k 48k low, webm_dash
250 webm  audio only      2 │    2.00MiB    67k https │ audio only           opus        67k 48k low, webm_dash
251 webm  audio only      2 │    3.92MiB   130k https │ audio only           opus       130k 48k medium, webm_dash
233 mp4   audio only        │                   m3u8  │ audio only           unknown             Default
234 mp4   audio only        │                   m3u8  │ audio only           unknown             Default
140 m4a   audio only      2 │    3.90MiB   129k https │ audio only           mp4a.40.2  129k 44k medium, m4a_dash

YouTube already has access to the audio for that song without any additional effort because of how YouTube works. I’m sure publishers can provide higher quality audio, up to 256Kbps but that option isn’t even enabled for users by default. By default you’re listening to “normal” audio or 130Kbps: i.xno.dev/Ow2eC.png

The reason why YouTube Music works is because they already have access to a huge library of music through music videos and the like. They save a ton of time and money by doing things this way and it makes perfect sense that they do…

I mean, I’m sure that it is less supported, but in all the years I’ve been using it I haven’t found one. 🤷‍♂️

You can buy an external drive that plays both CD and DVD

Find somewhere that accepts/generates ewaste and you might be able to score an internal CD/DVD drives. We were doing some reorganizing at work and I saw a literal box full of 5.25" drives

A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.

MP3 has some disadvantages over more modern formats, regardless the used bitrate. It’s been a long while since I was very interested in audio formats, so I may not be up to date on some newer developments but unless anything major changed, MP3 can’t do truly gapless playback between tracks (used in live albums), for example.

All people. 320kbps mp3 is completely audibly transparent under all normal listening conditions. It’s a low-tier audiophile meme to claim otherwise but they will never pass a double-blind test.

Vinyl is lossy in that any dust or scratches on the record can be heard in the output, so this is only true if you’ve got an absolutely pristine vinyl.

The original idea behind the superiority of vinyl was that the ambient audio was being recorded directly to the media. Of course, this wasn’t even true when it was first made, as they were using magnetic tape by then to record in analog. However, there is still some merit to the idea that an infinitesimal amount of quality is lost when translating sound waves to digital data.

Most of the actual differences between cd and vinyl, though, can be chalked up to the loudness wars ruining the mixes on cd.

CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There’s a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can’t record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won’t work.

It’s functionally impossible to improve on “red book” CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround…Stereo.) It’s why there really hasn’t been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80’s and still is.

This is what we were all told for years and years- that it was impossible that anyone could hear anything in vinyl that was supposed to be there but that couldn’t be reproduced with digital at cd quality. Then DVD came out And people could genuinely hear the difference from CD quality audio even in stereo. It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.

Might be a controversial opinion but I don’t think there’s a discernible difference between 320kbps mp3s and FLACs, and one of them takes up a fraction of the storage space. I have a pair of “audiophile” headphones and I can’t tell between them at all.

240 VBR was the sweet spot when drive space was expensive. Now I use flac lossless for things I care about.

Perhaps you have heard of people stepping out from behind a bush, unaware that there was an approaching cyclist because that cyclist didn’t realize that there was a need to ring the bell? Have you ever noticed when you phrase a question with a negative assumption it tends to affect how the person responds to that question? Communication takes practice, and with practice can improve over time. I believe in you, and think you have the ability to improve.

Check out the many OTR Gold podcasts that have the serialized shows as episodes.

Biggest free download site is probably www.oldradioworld.com

There’s also the Internet Archive - archive.org/details/oldtimeradio

If you like sci-fi I highly recommend X Minus One - www.oldradioworld.com/shows/X_Minus_One.php

I’m in the same boat: can’t hear any difference.

But, I have GBs of 320k MP3s… is it worth converting to Ogg ?

Mhmm I haven’t heard of the first two. I still listen to mp3s that I got from the 90s.

No doubt there are many superior codecs. Opus is amazing, we use it for voice and video over IP. But I doubt anything will ever be as universally playable as MP3.