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Comment by iamnotacrook | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm... You say that but my music collection is 3+ tb of flacs so that's not fitting on any sd card currently. I have a 64gb phone with a 200gig SD card in and whenever I consider getting a larger one, or a phone with more storage I realise that there's no point as I'm only thing to get another free percent of music on there. Given that I routinely copy/listen/delete music to my phone I'm not sure in practice there's a lot of difference between a 64/128gb phone with an SD card slot and just a 32/64gb phone without it.

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> You say that but my music collection is 3+ tb of flacs

Can the DAC on your Android actually benefit from the FLACs? Might make sense to re-encode the library into a format better suited to the playback hardware and leave the FLACs at home where the audio hardware benefits from it.

enthusiasts aren't necessarily using the onboard DAC. plenty of small external DACs exist that can receive a digital audio stream over the phone's USB.

I use the dragonfly red, a fantastic dac and amp that was significant upgrade over the built in phone one.

I’ve tried the Dragonfly on my phone and tablet and it was very unstable, and to my knowledge it was the only one to buy from friends who are far more knowledgeable on that than me.

I use it with the excellent USB Audio Player Pro. It uses its own driver for external DACs, I guess because the Android one is not fit for purpose.

At home I use a dragonfly red DAC paired with some open back sennheisers. But even when I'm out and about I benefit from FLAC. I use some noise cancelling Sony headphones which use the lossy LDAC codec over Bluetooth. My FLACs sounded noticeable better over LDAC, I guess because the music is only compressed once.

this is actually a great point that didn't occur to me. when you play audio over Bluetooth, you don't have much control over which codec gets used. if there's a high probability that your music gets transcoded in flight, you really don't want to start with a lossy source. lossy-lossy conversions are one of the only ways to create encoding artifacts that the typical person will actually notice.

Sounds good to me. Wired headphones or aptx hd bluetooth. Benefit from the flacs? I mean, it's just CD quality. 1980's standards! It's amusing how many other elements of technology are massively improved from the 1980's, and some of which are still improving, and yet CD was pretty much perfect, and it's STILL seen as some odd, edge-case extremist for wanting to listen to it and not, I dunno, 128kbps mp3s or whatever.

if you routinely copy a portion of your music to your phone, of course it makes sense to get more storage. I just don't bother doing that, because of the inevitable frustration of trying to play a song that isn't actually on my phone. rather than switch between streaming and local music all the time, I've just given in to streaming.

"if you routinely copy a portion of your music to your phone, of course it makes sense to get more storage."

Well, if you've only got a portion then the only difference between having 10% and 99% is how frequently you have to copy new music on/how long you can go without having to copy new music, at least in my case, where I delete albums off the phone as I play them, and copying music between linux server and android phone via samba/wifi is fast and simple. Streaming - ugh... i use public transport including the tube, I fly (sometimes), I end up in areas without perfect coverage, and I listen to flac so you can't stream that well, and it would take a lot of data, and the choice is limited, and I'd be renting music not owning it forever. Streaming doesn't solve a single problem for me (my daughter loves it, though).

Listening to flac on the tube... pick your battles! Can you hear the lack of compression over the rattling and shrieking?

Back in the day i used to listen to CDs on the tube and no-one told me I should be listening to a cassette based walkman instead. What's changed?

personally I just don't like to decide what I'm listening to ahead of time. I like to have my whole library available at any time. I'd love to have all my flacs/v0s on my device, but it just isn't feasible with current capacities/prices.

music is an extremely personal thing though. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people have very different usage patterns.

I stream, but I also have Spotify keep ~4,000 songs worth of saved playlists on my phone for flights and driving in areas with no service, etc.

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