Comment by WarmWash
4 days ago
Foobar2000 has an extension that allows you to blindly test whether you can tell the difference between two tracks.[1] The prime use is to compare different encodings of the same song from the same lossless master.
It kind of changed me a bit when I ran through 20 lossless tracks I had re-encoded to various mp3 bitrates and realized that even on a fancy system, it can be really hard if not impossible to discern even moderate lossy from lossless.
If you are an audiophile geek, really think about if you want to try this, the reality check might crack your foundations.
But try out to stream that mp3 from your home server in lower bitrate to save data, e.g. as opus. And now you suddenly hear the lossy encoding.
We store files in the highest quality because it gives us the option to encode the music without audible loss of quality.
I personally encode flacs as 192/256k opus from the start and that's fairly enough for most data save purposes, so no reencode for streaming is needed
that's a bitrate of 1GB per 9-12h, and for cases when it's too much I just have cached music on my device (I'm lucky to have mostly empty storage on my 256gb phone)