I Built My Own Audio Player

Technology has caught up many years ago, it's just that you insist on an format not fit for purpose. With good reencoding you get transparent audio quality (impossible to hear a difference) to fit all of your music on a much smaller card. (and as a backup you can always have those FLACs on the desktop)

Even if we agree on a format I don't want someone to quietly say a song I like is gone from my library while I wasn't looking due to some reason.

> Technology has caught up many years ago

citation needed. Youtube still gives you crappy, unlistenable 153kbps crap.

There are a number of studies on this but this one has a good summary (1). The TL;DR is that over 256 kbps for MP3 there's no significant data that listeners could perceive a difference to CD quality audio. Lower than that you can perceive artifacts.

I'm too lazy for finding this but I recall this study or similar repeated for trained listeners (musicians and mastering engineers) with the same results.

Note that MP3 is 30 years old and newer perceptual audio codecs can beat it.

YouTube picking lower bitrates is a problem but the qualifier here is "at sufficient bandwidths."

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257068576_Subjectiv...

People should use wavpack for archiving instead of flac, to be quite honest. It feels like FLAC has mindshare and name recognition but it doesn't support hybrid encoding (which is great for storing audio for archival and playback) or more than 8 channels of audio.

Music has 2 channels, so that feature is of no use. The other feature is cool as it avoids the need t maintain 2 sets of tags, though as far as I understand, it's not widely supported, especially in smartphones

You're not limited by YouTube, it's your library, your encoding settings. And you don't even need any citations, do a proper AB test yourself to confirm the well established

Music absolutely uses more than two channels. Or less. You don't need special "support" either any more than flac, you just decode it and write the bytes to your output buffer.

How prevalent is music with >8 channels???

And it wasn't "special", it's just apps don't support playing the format

You don't pick an archival format for the common case, you pick it for all cases. But to answer the question, virtually every film soundtrack for the last 10 years.

That doesn't make sense, you don't pick to suffer from poor support if you have a zero ore tiny niche case for it, you preserve it for that case only.

And you didn't answer the question, this discussion is about personal music libraries, like in the case of op collection of 25 years.

I'd bet almost all of them are stereo and not >8 channels

Perhaps. I've never gotten into the effort of re-coding everything, though I have converted some to MP3 to take on runs with me before memory cards exceeded the size of the data. I'm happy we're getting at a point not having to care anymore about disk space – that is, those of us not locked into a walled garden forcing expensive upgrades for more storage.

Does there exist an _objective_ method to test the sound quality difference between two files?

I could take a 54 kbs rip of Rust in Peace and reencode it at 256 kbs. It's not going to sound better than the 196 kbs rip, even though the bit rate is higher. What software would detect this? And other artifacts, such as clipping?

For some specific issues like clipping sure there are objective methods, and encoders use objective quality levels (so you don't target bitrate), and if it's not a tricky "subjective human experience can't be objective" question - the method to test is do A/B testing and see that humans can't detect a difference. That's audio transparent encoding. And since you don't care about other people for your personal phone use case, you can do this test yourself to detect the encoding quality level that's transparent to you.

And your examle doesn't make sense. You compare reencoded to the original, not to some 3rd sample. The issue here is whether to store large flacs or their smaller reencoded lossy variants. If you get a better quality flac, then you'll need to do another encoding to get a better lossy version

The idea is that once I have my CDs ripped to flac, I could run an encoder to MP3 for e.g. listening in my Tesla. But I don't know if the settings that work best for Dark Side of the Moon are going to be good for Rust in Peace. If there were some automated tool review hours and hours of audio, finding the discrepancies, that would save me a lot of time and provide me much enjoyment listening.