[natermer]

> I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents.

It is insanely cheap.

> Practically speaking, for a MacBook this means going to the 512 GB storage model instead of the 256 GB storage model, which is an extra $300.

That's really a issue related to buying and owning a Apple laptop rather then FLAC being too big. You bought something with very limited capacity that costs a huge amount of money to expand.

3TB drives are now about $100. That's _cheap_.

> Yes, let's not have people transcode music needlessly.

I transcode _all_the_time.

It's fun.

Why? Because my music I care about is in flac. So if I want mp3 I can have mp3. If I want AAC I can have AAC. If I want Opus, then everything can be had in Opus.

Some devices don't like AAC. Some don't like MP3 VBR. Many can't play Vorbis, and very few like Opus. But none of that matters to me.

I can stream to my phone over cell network without any major expense because now I can use Opus running at 60Kb/s to match what I used to get with MP3 at 128Kb/s

If I followed your thinking then I would have a great amount of my stuff in 256 Kb/s VBR MP3 LAME, because that was the best and most compatible technology for a long time.

Now where would I be?

[klodolph]

I feel like you're just trying to bait me here, so I'll bite.

Surely it must be obvious that different people have different priorities when it comes to purchasing computers? Is there something I'm missing? You want lots of storage for cheap and music encoded as FLAC. I want fast storage (PCIe flash) on a portable device with good battery life and access to my entire music library in a high-quality format.

The fact that you say transcoding is "fun"—well, I'm not sure how to respond to that, because it seems to support the point I was making—that different people have different priorities. I do not enjoy transcoding, I would rather avoid it. Perhaps because I don't enjoy it, I would make different choices. Just a thought.

The comment about converting to MP3 LAME is a bit of a bad joke. MP3 was never sonically transparent. Speaking as someone who did follow my own thinking on the matter, I only have a small handful of MP3s in my library. No other formats (including WAV, FLAC, or physical media) were available for those songs.

All the devices which I use for music playback play AAC. I consider this unlikely to change. AAC is sonically transparent, anyway, so a third generation copy of my library would be fine, if I needed to do it.

FLAC is for archiving and first-generation copies, and that's just not something I'm in the business of doing.

[haberman]

> 3TB drives are now about $100. That's _cheap_.

Cheap storage exists. Parent's point is that cheap storage isn't portable.

[themihai]

Online storage is not that expensive(i.e. $0.026 / GB / month). I'm not talking about iCloud.

[Natanael_L]

Then you're trading size and storage cost for battery life and cellular bandwidth cost.

[kbenson]

I can't help but feel the real elephant in the room here is the assumption that it's valid to expect tens to hundreds of gigabytes of compressed audio to be immediately accessible, and from a laptop no less.

[haberman]

What does "valid" mean here? If somebody wants to do that, and can do it with lossy compression, who are you to say it's "invalid"?

And who are you to tell them they should losslessly compress, even though it means that now they can't have what they want?

[kbenson]

What we have is general advice(which is correct) being countered by a someone citing a specific situation, in which all the aspects that make the advice non-applicable are constraints they have imposed on their self.

50 GB of music on a Macbook, which would require upgrading and this cost an extra $300, so it's not cheap. Does everyone need a Macbook? Does everyone need to use a laptop? Does everyone need over 17 days of music immediately accessible? Even if it's immediately accessible, does it need to be locally stored, or is remote access applicable?

The comment starts out with "I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents." What I meant by "valid" is does it apply to the majority of the audience the comment was aimed at, or are we hearing about someone's self-imposed problems?

It's sort of like a discussion about driving safety, and someone suggests using a specific high safety rated car which costs a little most, but not too much, and someone else jumping in and complaining how they are tired of that suggestion because the convertible version of that car costs far more. While technically correct, I would argue that the original advice probably wasn't even aimed at that person, but at those who value safety more that having a convertible.

Similarly, here we have someone that may care about quality, but I don't think it's hard to argue from their statements that they care less about quality than a few other factors, such as using an Apple product, using a laptop, keeping their files local, and having a very large store of music. Since the source of this stated "If you're really concerned over sound quality: use something lossless, like FLAC." I think it's entirely valid to point out that self imposed constraints such as the ones in this discussion are definitely something worth looking at when someone calls the usefulness of the comment in question.

That said, I'll fully admit I didn't express that well, and could have come across as preachy (and maybe I still am). I just think the original comment was worthwhile (if you care, keep your originals lossless), and didn't think the counter was very well presented at all.