I collect flac wherever i can on my Computer and sync it to my phone with transcode to lossy. I agree tho, a good lossy encode cannot be distinguished from their lossless version. Even less when you dont have the immediate comparison.

Three reasons:

• collectors appeal -> music on the internet comes and goes. Chances are that your file that you downloaded randomly becomes the only one available. having it in best available quality is the icing on the cake.
• generational loss -> the ability to transfer your music to any future media you like without/with minimal loss. Also if you remix/cut/edit stuff it keeps quality high
• killer samples -> given more agressive music, codecs might fail. There are some examples on hydrogenaudio.

I've been using the same off-brand MP3 player for like 15 years now. That thing is indestructible and has better battery life than my phone

https://www.navidrome.org/

Still keep a mostly FLAC/some MP3 library that I manage with Musicbee. Never felt the need to pay for Spotify.

Subscribed to Google Music when it was still a thing for about a year. Found it largely horrible for music discovery, which was surprising to me because prior to it I had discovered music mostly manually (browsing websites, etc.).

I wound up going back to running my own streaming software from my own MP3 catalog and haven't really looked back since.

Meanwhile I'm still enjoying my Bandcamp. They give me vinyl records and everything.

The radio is on all the time at my house.

Locally we have 24/7 classical, 24/7 Jazz/Blues, 24/7 bizarre college, 24/7 FUCKYEAHROCK, 24/7 FUCKYEAHOLDERROCK, 24/7 Talk radio, 24/7 HipHop/R&B both old and new school, shortwave, and whats your 20.

And I don't need internet for any of that. that said I do use mp3 (hallelujah and Amen break for that) and youtube for finding this and that.

But all of those stations have shows that I tune in for specific content.

Bach's lunch

commercial free fridays

Breakfast with the Beatles

A weekly show about movie soundtracks

A weekly show about young jazz and classical musicians

A bollywood show

and all i have to do is mute or change station to escape commercials or pledge drives.

cost to my bandwidth: zero

radio is where it is at still to this day.

I switched to Qobuz from Spotify. Never going back. Better sound quality, good UX, and they pay artists more than 10x what Spotify pays per stream.

Spotify has been promising better audio quality for years and I just don't think they will deliver.

YES MY PEOPLE

been doing it since 2011 never ever stopped. why would i stop? i never even got the point of spotify, oh cool only the official releases if the contract is currently valid, fun, i love paying so i need internet access anytime i want to listen as well.

in the last few months i've been buying vinyl actually which is even more antiquated and quaint and even more fun, really detailed immersive listening, feeling like you own a piece of the band

buy cheap 16G thumbs, load them with mp3s and gift them. ~$5/ea

Flac rule

OOTL - What features are being removed?

mp3 and opus is the way

I still do it because the weeb part of my library isnt all on spotify.

xmanager been good so far

(dont make them popular btw)

Squeezebox. Slimserver. Redacted.

The holy trinity.

I still have a collection of mp3s from the Limewire era.

I used to flex on the gigabytes my collection required. Now it seems like bragging about the length of your buggy whip. Kinda wish I'd stuck to it though... Now I'm just the curator of a big pre-millennium library.

I recently moved the old archive to a new drive and started adding to it again. The enshittification of all the things is real, seems like if it's something I'd like to re-watch or listen to the only sane way I'll be able to do so is by making sure I have a copy some company can't yoyo around.

I noticed Jellyfin can do music as well, but not really used it much. Need to get myself a mini PC as a server at some point. Seems a bit wasteful leaving a full desktop running just for that.

I'm still kicking the llamas ass after all these years. It just fucking works!

Is this some kind of sweet water joke, I'm too pirate to understand?

Even though I got files of many differing audio types, the feeling is still mutual. No dealing with ads or paywalled/removed features on Auxio on my phone or Strawberry Music Player on my desktop.

The amount of song has only been going up since I got my first smartphone in highschool and it feels good having them stored on my phone/desktop for local playback.