Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120).

The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. This is why when downloading music you should avoid remasters (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) and go for the first edition presses.

This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.

That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. You can’t transcode mp3s without killing the quality so if you ever want to convert formats (like for a mp3 player), you should stick with flac (16-bit, 48hz).

The original idea of 24-bit 192hz flac was for vinyl rips, where hypothetically you might be getting more information.

But who is using MP3 players these days any more?

I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go.

Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc.

I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.

I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.

Slightly off topic, but do you use something other than iTunes for this process? I'm looking for a good way to manage a FLAC library.

As far as I am aware, iTunes is not even able to play back FLACs, so when I am on a Mac, I use Clementine, (https://www.clementine-player.org), or cmus, (https://cmus.github.io).

Converting etc. I do exclusively on my Linux desktop, so can't help you there.

Heh. I'm actually on a Linux desktop but figured most people would reply with an iTunes-based solution. Cmus looks interesting I'd love to hear what your workflow is for converting, naming, tagging, getting artwork, etc.

I mostly use 7digital & HDTracks to acquire FLACs these days, but when I rip from CDs, I use https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper to do the job.

FLACs from 7d/HDTracks are already named & tagged properly so I only deal with it occasionally and when I do, https://picard.musicbrainz.org works well for acquiring tags & artwork.

When I need to rename/tag manually, https://kid3.sourceforge.io has been working nicely.

Also I haven't used it myself, but there's a lot of positive chatter around https://github.com/beetbox/beets for tagging etc. I just prefer not to have my files touched in such an automated way :-)

I rarely actually convert from FLACs these days, since I have set up Airsonic, (https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic), on my home server. I now have access to the lossless files directly, from anywhere.

When I do convert, I usually just use https://github.com/kassoulet/soundconverter - nothing fancy, but does the job. I do not maintain my whole library in both, lossless & lossy formats since I have set up Airsonic, but when I do want to save data & do not have access to WiFi, I just let Airsonic use lame to transcode to MP3s on the fly, (rare). If you cannot do that, don't have regular access to data on the go etc. I'd honestly just use https://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/Documentation/examples.ht... and put it in a script that checks if a .flac file in a folder or subfolder has a corresponding .mp3/.ogg file and convert if not, then just use find to filter out the format I don't want to copy over. :-)