Respect to anyone still managing a library of mp3s

Go FLAC or go home.

FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. 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. The file size is drastically different, though. 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.
Not to say that I don't prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don't avoid non-lossless albums either.
- 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.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
- 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"
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It's a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
- This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.
BUY ME BIGGER STORAGE BROTHER
- looks at his 42TB NAS
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but 'high enough quality' 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
- I'm still shuffling some of those.
- Don't forget Limewire and Kazaa
It's all about the 64kbps .wma's. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day

Still fits in a 1 TB sd card... Barely!
- 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
Jeez why did you have to call me out by name? =(

You mean there's more of me out there?!

✅ No buffering, music starts instantly

✅ No connection issues

✅ No monthly money drain

✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation

❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but

✅ I'm patient

I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
- 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.
So you don't have no immediate access? That's not how yes/No checkboxes work.
- 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?
Yes friend, we are one in the same. I still have the last gen iPod I use in my car. It has Bluetooth and I still even use the 3.5mm audio jack instead. I’m old and hate most new music coming out anyway. And if I do want to check something out I still preview it on Apple Music. If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.
- 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.
No immediate access to any song I want to hear
I have. Arrrr.
- I mean... That's not immediate, but it's close depending on the music and it's availability
It takes me no longer to gain immediate access then it does for a stream user to search and play the stream, even with rare or weird songs.
- 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.
No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
WDYM? If you want to listen before full download, there are some FUSE download managers on linux.
- 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?
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. If you switch phones you're SOL unless you want to deal with the insanely slow transfer speeds of androids MTP or whatever apples slow ass transfer protocol is. Not to mention your library is limited by how much space you have. My 10,000+ song playlists on Spotify aren't gonna easily fit on anyone's device, and definitely not at the highest quality that Spotify can stream at. 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. Locally stored music is just not anywhere near as good. It's lame and tedious and nearly pointless. At most, I'd say keep a couple albums you like with high quality FLACs but that's it. You're waisting your time not getting Spotify premium or Apple Plus or whatever the heck
Oh and this is coming from 20+ years of pirating media. Limewire used to be the best, but now it's firmly Spotify etc.
- 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:
  Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.
  Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.
  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.
  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.
  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.
- 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.
- 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.

Am I too FLAC to get these joke?

The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac

The owner of the mansion they're having the party in: wav

What features have been removed from Spotify?

Nothing if you're a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
- 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
I believe they've just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
- 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.
I was wondering the same. I haven't noticed anything.

FLAC master race check in.

FLAC on a NAS for self-hosted streaming.
- This is the way.
- I don't have good solution for that other than what comes with synology. I guess how badly my collection is catalogued plays a bit of a role.
  Physical copy on my phone SD card in 2023 lol
I don't really notice a difference it just takes up storage
- You'd probably notice it with better audio gear.
- I'm not going to pretend I can hear the difference, but I have plenty of storage so I don't care. I like having the best version available
- I have my music collection sitting as FLACs on my Multimedia PC, connected to my stereo System. I also have a service running that mirrors my music collection by converting it to m4a files and automaticly sends it over to my phone once it connects to my home wifi. I have set up the conversion (qaac64) so the difference between a flac and the m4a file is unnoticable over my bluetooth buds (playing the m4a from my phone).
  While I cant hear the difference on my phone, I definiley can hear a difference on my stereo / hifi headphones
- Part of whether you can tell a difference depends on your setup. If you have average gear, it would only make a minor difference. Also depends how much you care about how things sound. Most people don't give much of a shit if things are muddy or clear.
- The bigger issue is that if you decide to convert to whatever new lossy format might become popular in the future, it will be worse to convert from lossy to lossy than from FLAC to lossy.
  I use FLAC to archive my CDs and convert to mp3 to listen to them on my phone, in my car, etc.

To all the friends I never met:

I am running a homeserver with all my music, videos, books, articles, source, etc. here is how you do it↓

get a old desktop computer
install gnu/linux on it
connect it to your router through ethernet
install nextcloud
install samba, create a smb partition on your new server
mount the drive into your regular computer, phone, laptop, tv. smart-stereo.
enjoy all your music from anywhere without cluttering your devices with music, movies or books, or articles, or , or, or
I usually just use vlc to access any media on my smb share :D just works
get the nextcloud-client for phone and your other devices and access your smb share that way if you like and upload fotos, video or music there. :D

Thank me later (also if you use ALL linux devices you can skip the smb part and just use netdriv

Optional step, steal all the music you like with yarr containers
Jellyfin or Kodi can do the job too. There is a music server written in Rust with a web frontend somewhere on github as well. Managing any software written in PHP is too much PITA for me.
- I've heard of Kodi it's basically like your own netflix, no? Going to investigate Jellyfin along with the other suggestions.
I store everything on an openmediavault nas and serve up using Plex, Navidrome, Audiobookshelf, and Calibre, all running in Docker containers.

I do something similar with Plex. Is it just as smooth as Spotify or is it a little janky like Plex can be.
I've considered doing something like this since I've thrown up the black flag again (fucking streaming services acting like cable). But have been hesitant since music gets released so frequently.
- Do you use plexamp? It's very nice and smooth for music
- I guess a lot of people are flying the jolly roger since the streaming services split the big IPs 4 or 5 ways
Tbh, I've had an even easier time installing TrueNas on an old PC and then installing Nextcloud via their web interface.
Mind sharing your audiobook collection? I'm having a hard time finding good resources
- Oh my bad I mistyped, I meant I have a collection of books, I don't think I own any audiobooks, but I find a lot of them on youtube.
I prefer using a Subsonic API based music streaming setup. They work out of the box and have all the features you'd want.

Whips the llamas ass

I'm surprised more folks on here don't like FLAC.. it fits better 😉

You cant stream it on data connection without obliterating your data cap and battery.
You cant simply load FLACs onto your phone it kills the free storage in the blink of an eye. Try loading 1000 FLACs vs MP3s.
And moreover, there is a debatable gain or quality when you are on mobile with mobile gears/earphones.
MP3s fit in the middle of all restrictions.
I like FLACs, of course, but I can see why people just prefer MP3s
- And moreover, there is a debatable gain or quality when you are on mobile with mobile gears/earphones.
  The gain of quality is debatable in even the best of circumstances.
  Luckily you can easily run a blind test yourself.
- If you stream from a personal server you can configure it in most cases to re-encode the music to a lossy format like opus or mp3!
I just don't hear any difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3 and flac. If you manage a large library, 10x smaller matters a lot, it's faster to transfer, easier to share on the web, space still costs money.
it fits better
not on my drives!
- Yeah, i do 320 mp3s sometimes. Man are FLAC files big sometimes. Maybe get a NAS and some cheap disks?
I like my .opus files.
- I did a test some time ago of the diff track against flac, it was just noise at 192k, its awesome

It really whips the llama's ass

Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don't have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I've found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I've never been for bands I never would have found. It's more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.

Fair
2016 was a total gamechanger for me musicly. Spotify opend so many genres for me. I listen to so much music it would be an absolute pain in the ass to collect and manage all that music.

The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way

The old ways must be passed on

.flac or bust

i have 50gb of music that accumulated over the years. my phone has 128gb drive. no way i would be able to use flacs
- I have a collection of flacs but convert them for my phone to something lossless
- Considering it's going through a junky phone dac or Bluetooth earbud dac, convert them to 320 mp3 and store that on ya phone.
Don't forget about .ape.
- Please do forget about .ape. Proprietary, obscure format. Only advantage is that under some circumstances it can get you higher compression rates than flac. But it's way more resource intensive to decode so that advantage is really more theoretical. Use flac, forget ape.

*torrents syndrome
Time for some soul seeking
They complain about profit margin, when the margin is it costs 3 billion to make 3.5 billion. I mean, after everything is paid off, they are only left with 500 million. Can't you see that it cost them 3 billion to make that 500 million? They just paid 3 billion for that.
I really wonder if they think that sometimes.
Mullvad doesn't support port forwarding anymore.

I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn't actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.

Similar setup here, as a bonus I also connected my jellyfin to Listenbrainz to get recommendations and some sweet stats.

It's been more than 25 years of accumulating mp3, editing and cleaning my libraries, upgrading to flac, etc. Now going strong at around 600gb of music.

How do you remote access it?
- Plex along with Plexamp
- Not the person you asked but it's similar for me. I've used different solutions along the way, but now I'm running Jellyfin, which is great!

I don't deserve respect, it was the style at the time and i just kinda never stopped doing it.

Closing in on 200Gb of mp3 where i listen to the same 5 on repeat

I was the kid ripping CD's not to MP3 but to ogg Vorbis

Because - open source baby! 🥹😅

I ripped all my CDs to ogg vorbis and then, after a few years, I went back and reripped to flac. Now I transcode to mp3 if I have to for portability.
Most of my library is still mp3 though I do tend to try and get the ogg vorbis format nowadays, if possible.

Ive done the library management before. For the moment I'm still content with paying for spotify premium. I bet they will raise their prices in the future to make me rethink that, but for now i enjoy not having to manage a huge collection and my spotify recommendations arent terrible yet.

As soon as someone makes a FOSS song reccomender spotify is fucked
- It was called The Genome Project before it got bought and turned into Pandora.

Y'know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries.... but they're not mp3. Mines mostly flac.

If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don't like corporations deciding what I'm allowed to enjoy.

"managing" isn't exactly the right word for whatever the fuck I'm doing

My journey to mp3s was weird. Phones were already becoming common in high school but I wanted a music player after using the in-game ipod in Metal Gear Solid 4. But iPod classics were expensive and weren't drag and drop. Being on flights and in areas with spotty reception really made me see the value of portable offline music. No ads, no buffering, and no drain on my phone battery.

Yup I still use a standalone player. I got a Sony Walkman NWZ-385 first which was 8GB. It has the best ui I've seen on a player and I still have it. But now I moved on to a Sandisc with a 256GB micro sd card. Before I had to pick and choose but now I can have hours long files just dropped in no prob. And I have it a copy of everything on my pc hard drive.

Used to use an iPod classic with some winamp plugin, but microsd slots in phones basically got rid of the pmp for me.

Opus is the best. Anyone still using mp3s in 2023 is living in the past. Some users can still hear a difference between 256kbit/s mp3 audio and uncompressed audio while Opus reaches transparency at about 120kbit/s.

In the realm of compression transparency is when the compressed medium is indistinguishable from the source audio by a human

Huh, I was wondering why that was becoming the default everywhare. Time to Re-encode my library so I can carry more of it on my pocket computer. Tech is awesome.
That and you can just download opus from youtube using yt-dlp lol. It's 100% great. Anybody transcoding youtube audio to mp3 is definitely doing it wrong lol
- Thats why most of my yotuube downloads is .mka I found that matroska has better support than webm or ogg lol
How does it differ/compare to aac?
- Under 100 kbps it sounds significantly better. I have decided that i dont want to choose on the least shitty lossy option tho, when i can have flac.

Advice: FLAC is better than mp3

I still buy music CDs and rip them to mp3s. Then I sync my Music collection to the various devices. I even sync it to a USB stick that plugs into the car. I don't have Spotify; I have Strawberry.

Rip to FLAC concert to MP3 If your on Windows MusicBee is amazing. Trying to find something similar for Linux.
I never made it past Napster mp3s into whatever Apple or Spotify offers. I did eventually rip all of my CDs to Flac before giving them away.
I also upload them to Play Music once they bought out Songza but that service changed over to YouTube Music not long after which I share with 5 people so I have gotten use to that as my ad free radio and YouTube.
Accuradio was another favorite along with Jango many years ago but that was with a ad blocker then.
I still have a portable MP3 player that I used for plane trips. Now it's just a nostalgia listen to the time when I loaded it in the late 2000s.

I just bought two CDs today.

I so need an active CD Collectors sublemmy. One of the few things I miss from Reddit

Is there any piece of software that can help a degenerate like me fix my MP3 collection to not be such a fucking messy nightmare? Paid or free doesn't matter to me.

It sounds like MusicBrainz Picard would fit your needs well. It can do acoustic fingerprinting to find tags for poorly tagged files, it works on all major OSes, and it can organize your music folder pretty much however you want it to. The one thing I think it's not great at is album art but there are plenty of tools to handle that
Mp3tag is great if you don't mind manually editing. I've used it plenty of times, specifically for OC audio
Go full plex/jellyfin media server and set up the *arrs to deal with this for you; see wiki here: https://wiki.servarr.com/
I've been using Plex and Jellyfin for a while. Setting up the *arrs is on my list of future projects.
MusicBrainz Picard, been using it since like 2007.
I use Ear Tag as a simple metadata editor for music files. Or Rhythmbox as a desktop library manager. Czkawka is good for weeding out duplicates and empty files. If your tracks have metadata for title, artist and album it's not the end of the world if the songs aren't properly sorted into folders.
I assume your problem is with the metadata? Just search for a "free mp3 audio tag tool" or similar and you should be able to find several options. Some of them might only do 100 tracks for free but there are workarounds. I've used several of them but it's been years. Nowadays I just rip all my own CDs into .flac with EAC or ABCDE depending on which computer I'm using and let it do the tagging for me.
- If you're looking to fix metadate musicbrainz Picard would be my go to one. It's Foss and an good at what it does. Though I'd always recommend keeping an eye on it as sometimes it can start thinking rad on singles are are best ofs and not the albums they're on making a mess of things.
- My problem is folder structure. I have everything in an absolute mess! I've been collecting mp3s since AOL no joke.
- Pretty sure you could edit them in windows too?
I can't help, but there are a bunch of other comments in this thread throwing out software names that I've never heard of before today. Bound to be something!
MusicBee is working great for me.

What features did Spotify nix?

I think the free version basically removed the ability to pick the exact song you want to play,there was a headline on here a couple days ago like "Spotify reinvents the radio" but in general Redditor fashion, I didn't read past the headline.
I saw an ad for an artist I like having a concert nearby at the top of my homepage. Relevant, but still an ad as a premium subscriber. I see ads when artists release a new album too sometimes, but they usually tend to be pretty good. Smart Shuffle could become ads in music form since I'll bet they were paid to put at least some of those specific songs there. It's annoying that smart shuffle isn't a separate button from normal shuffle too. They also raised their prices a bit.
It's really not bad yet, but all of these recent changes combined is a sign that enshitification is coming. But it does seem like they are being careful about it and not destroying the core of their product for momentary greed.

over 50k flac's perfectly sorted with MusicBrainz Picard. So used to it I don't see any inconvenience

My brother once shared an rdio playlist with me. I used the firefox dev tools to download all of the songs to my library. A few months later, rdio shut down. To this day, a piece of rdio lives on on my hard drive.

I was a major fan of Rdio over Spotify back circa 2012. Way better interface and they had human curated suggestions which kicked ass. Learned about a ton of new artists through that. Miss Rdio a lot! Kind of sad that Spotify won out. I always figured it was the “social” aspect of spotify which did it (and ironically is basically a relic now)

I don't add anything to it (not even sure I could) but I still use my Zune every now and then.

As I have understood it, the one good Microsoft product.
- I like to hate on M$ as much as the next lemmy nerd but honestly they made a lot of great hardware for many years. The M2000 is still my favorite mouse and my daily driver for years. They've also made the best console controllers for years and the competition isn't even close there.
- A real shame. The first generation product was such a piece of crap and the product name itself was so incredibly bad that by the time the Zune HD, which was better than any competing product in just every every way, came out, the damage to the brand was irreparable.
- Squirting.
Long live the Zune! Still use mine today

Do yourself a favor and get a record player and some records, vinyl if you can. Then sit down and really listen. Don't do anything else while listening. It pays off, I promise.

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 do something very similar. I have all my music on a network share with a playlist folder inside. I run a script that copies all the lines from an .m3u playlist file and copies them to another music folder inside my user folder, converting any FLAC files along the way.
I then user SyncThing to synchronize that folder with my phone. Makes it super easy to get all my music and playlists when I upgrade to a new phone.

a = *lines from playlist file* new = *destinationFolder* # If the mp3 version of the flac is older than the flac or doesn't exist in the destination, # convert it from Flac to variable bitrate mp3 if [ "$a" -nt "${new[@]/%flac/mp3}" ]; then echo Converting $a ffmpeg -y -i "$a" -qscale:a 0 "${new[@]/%flac/mp3}" fi
There's some cleaning and other steps done but I'm willing to share or provide more details if anyone is interested.
- Its a shame that you NEED a secondary lossy archive. You can only do true on-the-fly functionality when the syncing and music app are not seperate. Currently i use MusicBee for the transcoding and resilio for the syncing. I should propably switch over to syncthing too tho.
killer samples -> given more agressive music, codecs might fail. There are some examples on hydrogenaudio.
Can you clarify what this is? Are there songs that cannot be stored in mp3 form? I tried searching it but I just got a bunch of results about murder instead.
- Killer samples are lossy sounds that are distinguishable from lossless regardless of bitrate. They are usually handcrafted extremes that you wouldnt find in any real audio.

I have the same mp3 I ripped from a cd decades ago that has a bug in one of the tracks, and I love it.

My personal mp3 collection is quite comprehensive. I use musicolet to play songs at random in the car.

I find that much more rewarding than anything Spotify has to offer.

Spotify always finds a way to play top 40 to me. Oh you like post industrial banging on a trashcan to sawing noises? Check out Taylor's new album.
- The hell are you doing on Spotify for it to do that?
  Hell, I use my personal account to play songs for my job, which involves a lot of top 40 and Spotify still doesn't recommend that to me

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

“Pathetic.”

Laughs in 8TB NAS

8tb of music or capacity

https://www.navidrome.org/

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

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.

That's almost identical to my story. After that, I found Navidrome, which started my adventure in self-hosting. I've never looked back

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.

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.

Lucky you. Radio sucks where I live
- I believe that. It is a lucky situation.
  That said, streaming radio sucks everywhere.
Radio was meh at best here. Classical/NPR, 1 old country station, 3 new country, 3 classic rock, 1 rock alt, 2 Christian, 1 oldies and 1 interesting one that has been a game changer.
That one is The Summit in Akron Ohio. Locally owned and plays mostly indie rock but also damn near everything. Polka, bluegrass, blues, you name it. I've discovered enough music from them that I bookmarked their playlist page on my phone for quick access. Also no ads (they are funded by the public via memberships and donations) and no morning talk shows!
You can find them on Radio Garden if you want to check it out

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

If you're already paying for Spotify swap for YouTube music, you can upload 50,000 of your own tracks and get ad free YouTube as a bonus

Flac rule

Squeezebox. Slimserver. Redacted.

The holy trinity.

Slimserver!!!!!

OOTL - What features are being removed?

Select songs and rewind are paid features now.
- Oh, removed from free spotify? I don't think I could name anybody that uses free spotify, has it ever been a viable way of listening to music?
- who in their right mind isnt at least pirating spotify premium. free spotify is garbage

mp3 and opus is the way

What's opus?
- Audio codec, often used with ogg container format. Opus is in some aspects better then mp3.
I personally prefer AAC

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

I love buying vinyl too! I have a small collection spanning a few genres, but it's mostly videogame soundtracks, hah. I currently have a crappy Sony turntable that's apparently infamous for scratching records, so I'm holding out on spinning til I get a good one. I'm thinking one of the Audio Technical models that people recommend often.

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.

xmanager been good so far

(dont make them popular btw)

Never heard of it, and I DEFINITELY never use it all the time. You people talk about the strangest things. You sound like those revanced worshippers over in Oakridge. Nice lot. They put on great shows that don't seem to get interrupted, unlike the cult of yootoob.

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 started doing the same with dvds. I was the guest on a shared Netflix account. I was almost done with Avatar The Last Airbender when they started doing their lockout shit, so the next night I got the whole damn series and Legend of Korra on dvd. I forgot how awesome commentary and behind the scenes content can be.
And your local library has been hoarding dvds for years too so you can also use that, not to mention digital options.
- Thank heaven for libraries <3

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.

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

https://www.f-droid.org/packages/com.zionhuang.music/

Just gonna throw that in here completely unrelated 👀

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.

Works well! I use an Android app called Symfonium to access my FLACs (hosted on a Pi)

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

Qobuz masterrace unite

Used to be heavy in the business, still have 32,000 songs left of my collection it used to be a few thousand more.

Got into it back when I had no regular internet access, where you'd have to grow your music on your own and seasons make all the difference in going outside to find a wifi hotspot and then download a list of albums that you prepared for beforehand by doing hours of research in your free time at 1 MB/s, during good hours, sitting in the freezing cold watching LibreTorrent or Freezer 24/7 on your old phone because it didn't have enough RAM to actually store an app and let it work in the background. And at the same time hoping the years-old battery would hold enough power left to last the 2 hours it took you to go home. For multiple years in succession, downloading at least 20 albums at each opportunity.

Yeah, I did some work for my collection. It's why I also can't delete it, had I deleted it within a month it would be different, but after multiple years it would feel too much of a waste. It's a monument of the same time frame in which an incredulously important person to me partook in. The first few months of this year were my second deepest spot ever, and thus I got incredibly bored of everything and, because of that, couldn't get into an artist at a time anymore, if at all. I came to the conclusion that ignoring the problem is the only thing I could realistically do, so my mood never improved or decreased, it was just a plateau that's depressing to look back at. Beginning of September I found the band Waterparks for myself and recently started expressing myself more how I want it (:3). The switch-up really fueled me to question if I could actually had a chance at being passively moderately happy, after almost two decades of having felt pretty much nothing. Music represents me, I couldn't.

Wow, I'm rambling high again, sorry not sorry :3

me but opus instead of mp3 and ViMusic instead of Spotify

It's super easy for me to maintain a library of offline music because I just listen to the same synthwave tunes and 90s dad rock over and over. Saves me $120+ a year. If I want a new song or album, I use a YT downloader extension.

I still play physical CDs every day. Still buying them, although that is getting to be more difficult, sadly.

I have a nice Rotel CD player at home and a CD player in my vehicle. I got a great CD/DVD duplicator for $50 used so all those CDs in my truck are easily disposable copies of my originals that stay at home.

I should rip them all but that is a lot of work. I did rip many of them to 192 khz mp3s a while ago so that has been enough so far.

Streaming is nice but the fuckery will continue and they can miss me with that shit.

This made me remember that my five CD disk cartridge in my Volvo no longer works ... it's great to have access to physical content but mechanical things break down too.
- Yes things do break down. They still sell CD players. Scamazon has many portable ones including Sony. I bought my main home CD player art worst buy ( magnolia).
  I recently bought a portable CD player that outputs a FM signal. So I can play my CDs on the radio now. Which can replace a car CD player. Studebaker brand.
  But IDK about new car audio with a CD player. A quick look at Crutchfield shows they do still sell CD players and DVD players.

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

You can just pirate the mp3s ( for legal reasons I definitely havent done this for the entirety of my song library

I only use Spotify for a couple of exclusive podcasts I like and maybe some comedy. I certainly wouldn't pay for a subscription since I don't listen to much music and I hate the user interface especially through Android Auto.

The only time I really listen to music is late at night in front of the PC and I have a music collection for that. It's amazing how cheap you can pick up old CDs these days second hand in car boot sales and similar. It's just cheaper to buy CDs and rip them rather than fork out 11 euros every month.

To this day I do my own personal MP3 mixes 😏

It's harder to find (legal) downloadable music anymore too. 7Digital has been pretty alright for me, but I just stopped bothering with Spotify and Pandora and such. Youtube used to be great for discovery until they started mega cracking down on adblock again.

How often people are just getting rug-pulled left and right by streaming services is ridiculous.

got a music folder with newpipe downloads and Poweramp on my phone :) all I need

I'm too cheap to get an unlimited data account and I don't want to use up my mobile data. I have a separate ipod touch for my music, so it frees up space on my actual phone, so if one gets broken/lost/stolen, I'm not completely out of everything. Plus, I like the idea of actually "owning" my stuff, as much as you can own digital files. After my Dad passed, I picked up all his mp3s he had saved and merged them into my library, so I also like the idea of potentially passing on this collected library to my kids (if they care enough or the world hasn't transitioned completely to streaming music when I die).

Managing a library now is easier than ever. Managing mp3s specifically is a very odd choice though

geometry dash asset music ..

1.5Tb and counting, where my data hoarders at?

I used to lurk on the reddit sub for data hoarders, even though I haven't started data hoarding myself. Do we have a lemmy community for that yet?
- Not sure, but I hope so!
1.8Tb stored on an 8Tb NAS drive. Plenty of room for more music hoarding.
- Preach! 🙏
how much of that did you at least listen to once
- Most of it, admittedly almost all of it I've only played once, buuuuuut....I'm not just gonna throw away good data! It's like several years worth of music, and it's nice when someone's like: Eyyyyy, pop this track on YouTube on the TV!
  And I'm all: Fuck that! Pop it on the big speakers, got that guy's whole discog in lossless!

Does no one still use Winamp and midis?

Whipping the llama’s ass!
I actually do still use an old version of winamp on my PC and poweramp on my phone, but my library now is almost entirely flac. Still working on phasing out some old mp3s..

Meanwhile me still listen some songs locally (self host Jellyfin) because some songs that I listen are not available on Spotify :/

Thinking about to reencode my collection to opus but "too lazy" as my ripped collection are 320kbps mp3 to save space.

Some streaming services like Deezer (free version available) and Apple Music (only paid plans) offer an easy way to add your own tracks your library. I listen to a few songs that aren’t available on Apple Music and all I have to do is drag them into the desktop app and it syncs to all my devices, full with custom cover art and metadata. And iirc, Deezer has a page for uploading mp3s that they then add to your library.
Spotify also has a way to add custom songs, however iirc, it was only possible through individually syncing each and every device you want those songs on with the desktop app.
- Never knew deezer has such feature (perhaps due to I use them back in 2020-2021 then ditched it). For apple music not interested with their ecosystem.
  The spotify solution require premium subs, besides Im happy to use my self host solution using my old laptop :) (Currently sitting with 200gigs of mixed MP3 and FLAC collection)

I wonder if I still have my Creative Nomad Jukebox somewhere... came out in 2000. Was the size and shape of a portable CD player so it fit in the same kind of cases. Took normal AA batteries. Had a 6 GB capacity, which was insane in 2000. I had a huge number of MP3s on it. Many radio dramas. I wish I still had them elsewhere.

Anyone else use a terminal to rip flac from tidal?

I share mp3s via google Drive links. browsers know how to play them

@deezertogdrivebot Use this telegram bot to rip from Spotify

Mainly a spotify user but I always keep an mp3 library

I just got myself a record player/cd player/cassette player. Back to analog.

And digital. CDs are digital.
- Digital and lossless. So futuristic!

It's pretty easy to get high amounts of mp3s

Almost 300GB of MP3s, and I keep everything organised. All 320kbps, all tags correct, artwork done, etc... I started this years ago and simply kept on doing it. I have a separate hard drive for music, and another to back it all up. I even use a Fiio X1 MP3 player that I purchased around 2013. MP3 players were getting hard to buy as it was back then. If this breaks, not sure what I am doing? It's all quite retro and old school, I guess?

@ruud@mastodon.world you had something like that too! lol

Dedicated MP3 players (or DAPs as the kids call them nowadays) are cool.
Bring back iPods and Walkmans again.
- 💯 iPods with RockBox!

Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG's OSTs and Apple's iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple's music subscription, as it is DRM'd.

MP3 isn't dead but smells funny. Today I manage a ton of OGM, AAC, FLAC and other formats.

Can us vinyl heads get in on this?

That only seems fair

After I got rid of Spotify Premium subscription, I tried this app called InnerTune. It's basically the same as Spotify, with synced lyrics, music searching and download (not mp3 though)

But things got messy when I was flying long haul using a LCC, where at first I can play a song from a downloaded playlist but cannot manually play next/previous/another songs from the same/different playlists and not long after the app crashed

I guess mp3 is still the best choice, I currently use older version of Spotify desktop (old UI and no ads) and spotdl. 128 kbps mp3s are good enough for me

In the summer I figured out how to install and setup airsonic. Life changing.

Unless you have just an absolutely massive library what is the advantage of this over just file sync? I prefer file sync as I'm often listening on portable devices and it's nice to not rely on a connection and working server as two points of failure.
- It’s not massive but it’s about 300gb. Plus nowadays it’s only a backup tbh. Like a home jukebox.

I mean, I use them my prime 4 dj system because i'm not always gonna be sure about internet availability at the next venue. I don't want to DJ for other humans while using my phone as a 5g accespoint.

THATS ME!

Great username OP

Thank you much

I have several playlist. Largest is my "Pop" @ 4854. I add new music every week.

Never considered a streaming service.

I used to. But in the later years I found it very difficult to carry this much weight. In addition to that, I've realized the transient nature of my music tastes and my over-reliance on music. Also my priorities have changed a lot. Music is far from essential for survival, and when the times get rough (when you move a lot, and all you can take with you is your laptop), it's much easier to access an online library than your own physical one. I've decided to keep the mp3s (m4as, wavs, flacs, etc.) of the songs that aren't on Spotify and remove everything else.

Yeah them removing music I listen to cause of licensing bullshit was why I quit Spotify a couple of years ago and went back to buying and pirating music again just like before. Plus I get better audio quality, have like 1 tb of mostly 24-bit Flacs on my NAS with Plex. I do also not have to keep paying more and more for the same content cause they find out they cant keep infinite growth so they squeeze the existing subs for more money instead. Fuck I hate subscriptions in general. The only thing I miss are the mixes and radio cause it made me discover so much new music.

i only have 2000 :(

Spotify dubstep always somehow had worse variations than what was available on Youtube.

I found that Soundcloud is really good for dubstep, also for niché artists
- SoundCloud and Mixcloud

they're looking down on them while having no features other than play and pause lol

Honestly, what I need is a recommendation-engine like Pandora that I can basically just set the computer to download any/all new music, and then I can listen to "Radio" by selecting a song, and metadata used to suggest whatever song comes next.

MP3 user eh?

MP3 has been obsolete since 2002 when Vorbis got it's first stable version.