Offline Music

[Ayana Otonashi]

I have like a hundred vinyls and many more CDs, gotta compliment my awesome setup tbf

 

[Briarthorn Addict]

Storage is so cheap these days I can't even think of a reason to use a lossy codec for music.

The mean file size for a FLAC file in my collection is 30MB, while it's only 3.5MB for an average Opus. Comparing transcodes, I get a consistent 80% file size reduction going from FLAC to Opus. My library is 150GB almost entirely Opus, at a running time of 1150 hours. This would be around 750GB if it were all FLAC. Where I live, a 256GB SD card is at most a third the price of a 1TB one.

I should hear a difference with the equipment I have, but I've A/B tested myself and I can only weakly predict which one is the lossy Opus, and that's in ideal listening conditions. I like to keep local copies across various devices of my entire library for convenience and the smaller footprint means less time necessary for data transfer. Opus works great for streaming (think multiroom setups, where some devices are only connected through weak radio links, where high bandwidth FLAC would cause dropouts; I have a small PA system in my back yard).

I keep a master FLAC copy for certain albums for which I can hear a difference with Opus, usually modern production with insanely clean mixes, or just ones that I'm particularly fond of. In either case, I seed at least until a 2.0 ratio if I downloaded it over P2P.

For me, lossless has diminishing returns: I can't really tell the difference, I don't transcode enough to cause bitrot, and I have a library large enough to where keeping it in FLAC would be prohibitively costly. Maybe I'm just too autistic with a super niche and completely backwards use case. I think of FLAC the same as oversampling, it's only really useful if you need the headroom.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

Is this a joke subforum, or is your question of "does anyone have offline music" genuine?

 

[Boggy B]

As above, learn to read sheet music and play it on an instrument you like the sound of. Couple hours of practice each day and you'll be a million times better at the end of the year than if you had just sat around gooning with that time instead.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

I still like to treat my phone like an old-school MP3 player. I didn't, and still don't, stream my content, I load MP3 and MP4 files locally onto it.

I rip CDs, DVDS, and Blu Rays. One DVD in particular is a BBC production called Supervolcano. I can't play it normally in most DVD/Blu-Ray players here, but it works just fine on my computer via a USB Blu Ray drive, and once I rip it, the region doesn't matter anymore.

Back then, I liked to download YT videos using browser plugins or other 3rd Party apps so that I could watch them on the go where no internet was available. To this day, I still download music from YT by downloading the videos as MP3 files.

As for videos, I do know that the media players I once used required you to convert your videos to a format that's playable by the specific device. It's so cool that it's no longer necessary, you can just load up MP4 files onto your android phone and VLC will play it, just like that.

 

[Baguette Child]

If you're worried about EMPs, you can get an older phone that can be rooted.

Symbian OS master race, we're equally useless before and after the EMP but at least we have a pretty good built in MP3 Player and headphone jack yo. No need to root.

You own your own filesystem and there's no google because it didn't exist yet. SD card slot says it only takes 2gb but I run a 32gb in mine just fine. Properly stored music has me at close to 4000 tracks on a single card, and I can just swap cards to whatever I feel like listening to at the time since the SD card slot is an externally accessible metal hinged door instead of hidden under the fucking battery.

Oh, and my original 2008 era model is still rocking the original battery. It gets 6 hours screen on time and about two days of idle. Power efficient processor + small battery means I can charge from solar quickly and with minimal sunlight requirements.

Also I recently wrote my own offline maps program for Symbian S60v3 so at least for a little while after the collapse I'll be rockin' out and enjoying life in the backwoods. Soydroid and iFag users get bent.