I Built My Own Audio Player

I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry wants to push or deal with ads. It's cool to see some even go to great lengths to write their own application.

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)

> Technology has caught up many years ago

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

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

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