I hoard music. I have a 117gig library full of lossless flacs, something that you don't see an average high-schooler/mathematician doing. Although it's comparatively smaller than what the expert hoarders have- petabytes. Mine is only a fraction.

But why even that? Several reasons:

  1. I like to have control over the media I consume; I hoard other types of media too. No Netflix, no Spotify, and no YouTube unless necessary: I like my files local.
  2. I am an avid audiophile. Though my rig is quite modest (yet), I like to listen to a higher quality audio than average folk. Though nothing wrong with listening to okay-ish quality here and there; I AM NOT A PEDANT!

Examples of exceptions: I do stream music when my friend pesters me to listen to that one song or when I need to revisit my 80s mix/radio. I use Metrolist (FOSS) on my phone for that.

Okay, 117gigs. That's a lot. A lot for an Android phone, or a minimalist ThinkPad with 512gigs of storage. But again, I need my music handy. I listen to stuff a lot.

I have two options: serve it via Navidrome/other music server, or take it local. I tried the former, and well.... storage is cheaper than bandwidth + power consumption. I can't afford to have server running, with internet and Tailscale configs and so on.

Thus, a truce- convert all the flacs into opus. And take it local.

If you look at the specs of the opus codec, you'll see some impressive stuff. I don't want to get into technicals here, but TL;DR- opus "conserves" ~95% of the good stuff, and that too with a considerable amount of compression.

Think about this: all my flacs (a mix of 24 and 16 bit, about 1700 songs), of 117gigs converted to 128k opus is just 14gigs!! That's ~12% of the original! And that too without losing too much of the "quality."

Surely, I can take those 14gigs anywhere. On my laptop, on my phone, no worries. Now the question is: how much time does it take my computer to do all of this?

Well, in a modern computer, it takes very less. ffmpeg can encode flacs into opus in a fairly high speed. And most conveniently, you can use the power of scripting to do it for you!

You can have your main flacs in a harddrive, convert them to opus into your laptop, then you can rsync/syncthing it to your mobile device. Simple workflow!

This is the script I use for encoding my whole library, which checks for new files and encodes those only, for which the core command is:

ffmpeg -v warning -n -i "$file" -c:a libopus -b:a 128k "$target_path" < /dev/null

I find this pretty cool. No more fussing. Just me and my music. Simple *nix tools such as ffmpeg can do wonders.

So this way, I can just put stuff on my phone and laptop and listen away. I use cmus on my ThinkPad and Poweramp on my Android.

Ending with some music recs:

Cheers!

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