[pimeys]

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.

[vitamark]

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)