What is the best format settings to store a physical music?
I did look at Flac but the data is almost the same size as the uncompressed Wav and none of my devices or self hosted services seem designed to play flac files. Everything gets converted.
What are people using?
I save everything in mp3 128kbps. I compared the quality with higher quality and with my setup (Bose speakers & in ear headphones) and with my ears, I can’t hear a difference. Opus is more efficient but my source is already in mp3 and I don’t gain anything by converting it. If I had to convert from flac, I’d choose opus. 1 4k movie is so big, the size of music doesn’t really matter at all.
The only downside to keeping everything in a lossless format is that over the years new formats emerge. mp3 used to be the only game in town, but now we have multitudes of lossy formats to pick from. By having your collection in mp3 format, you aren’t able to say “hey, this new format looks cool, let me switch to that”. By storing everything in a lossless format (FLAC), you can convert for mobile as you see fit.
What could I gain from switching? Playing mp3 will always be there and even if support is dropped in 30 years which is highly unlikely, the server can transcode on the fly. I’m unfortunately/ luckily no person with ears that can hear a slight difference between losless and 128kbps
Just flexibility and future proofing. Having/building a music library is very time consuming, so I’ve chosen to do it properly so there’s no work in the future.
Since my stuff is all FLAC it doesn’t matter what new lossy formats become popular 25 years from now. My music server will convert it on the fly to stream it to my phone.
For you personally? Not much at all. For a real archive future proofing is great.
A lot. Mp3 is a proprietary format on copyright. Some idiot ceo can came and change the rules, let’s add an ads mandatory for each decoder. Today with a bunch of open source good quality formats, is kind of pointless depending on a private company for your music.
This is not true. Copyright is not relevant to an encoding standard. The standard has been unchanged for 26 years and all legal claims of patent rights related to implimentations of the standard have expired before May 2017.
@[email protected] you should probably know about this as well.
Thanks!
patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.
That is valid and good criticism of mp3!
I wonder if navidrome can handle switching from mp3 to opus.
From what I’ve heard it’s impossible to go from one lossy format to another without losing quality.
I’d test it first, I don’t expect hearing a difference