goodbye flac

Since abandoning streaming, I've been buying albums and slowly building up my personal library of music. Very enjoyable and I've really been appreciating Doppler on my my Mac and iPhone. One of the upsides of buying music is the availability of file formats. Since Doppler can play all the formats and I'm managing my music locally, I was mainly focused on downloading FLAC files; I even bought new, wired headphones with a great sound stage to make the best use of the format! Unfortunately, I had forgotten one issue with wired headphones: The wire and/or the connector tend to fall apart if you aren't careful.

I walk a lot and commute on the bus and the subway, so I can't really afford something that can't take a bit of a beating...even if I'm careful, it's just going to go through some wear and tear. I think the USB-C connector was especially problematic as I think that's the root of the issue; the wire seems fine and can't help but think that, if I had a 3.5mm headphone jack, I wouldn't be having the issue I'm having.

Luckily, I still had my AirPods that I had replaced. Since AirPods use Bluetooth, which can't transmit the large files, using FLAC doesn't do anything (it's transcoded and compressed regardless, you might as well use a compressed format like MP3). So, I'm back to my AirPods. Even though Bluetooth connections can be a pain and forgetting to charge the battery can be a pain, those are, for me, infinitely more tolerable than my headphones constantly cutting out because the USB-C connector was bumped or the wire pulled.

Now, I didn't have to ditch my entire FLAC library for MP3, except that my library is getting quite big and those lossless FLAC files do start to add up. It was pain, but replacing all of my FLAC files with 320kbps MP3s will be worth it. There is much more music I want to add to my library and the smaller file size makes it very easy to keep up with all the downloading. Additionally, I can just transfer everything over wholesale to my iPhone. It was a pain to switch, but I'm happy I did it. Especially because, in the end, there's no perceptual difference between (CBR) MP3 and FLAC for me.