Depends what format you have it in now. 160kbps opus is transparent for almost all music. That's 1/5 the space of a FLAC collection, or 1/2 the size of 320kbps mp3, two other popular ways to store music without noticeable loss in quality.

I actually do encode to 128 opus and crank up the encoder settings for music synced to my own devices, because I know they can play it. It's pretty much transparent to me but I am not an audiophile with audiophile equipment, which is why I keep the originals.

Why? that's not much more than 1TB, easily available in various storage formats for a very low price. What's the issue with the size?

It's not very portable. I can't keep it on my phone without a 1TB micro SD, and I could theoretically carry an SSD but thats not really portable as it requires internal connection. And if it's an external drive with a USB connection then it's probably much larger than my phone.

It's certainly able to be kept and it's not a particularly unwieldly amount of data for the average power user, but if I ever had to bring my music somewhere (and I mean all of it) I'd be screwed. Plus that data would take hours to copy if ever needed. I spent just an hour today dding a 64GB SD card.

I just keep my favorite albums and discographies in 320 MP3 as I know there is almost no music player on earth that will fail to play it. Then I keep that in a micro SD in my wallet, for that emergency in which you desperately need some Pink Floyd.

More likely that storage capacity/$ will scale faster that codec efficiency.

In a few years you’ll have it on your phone anyway!

1. Wow, what an obsessive music geek you are.

2. Consider https://beets.io for management, it may be just the system you want. One of its features is converting you library into a lossy version while keeping your high res files in a very managed way.

As you seem knowledgeable, it looks like beets manages music you've already ripped, do you have a suggestion for ripping? Last time I tried, it was a disaster (I got a lot of poor quality audio and ended up nuking everything because it was too much work to listen to everything and try again)

It's been a while since I ripped my last CD, but I always found https://github.com/bleskodev/rubyripper very useful. It uses cdparanoia to get multiple rips and combines them into what it thinks is the exact information located on the original cd.

These days, I can fortunately download most stuff directly from bandcamp :)

Now that's cool. Thank you so much, I'll look into that.

Personally for me the issue is not the size but the transfer (think streaming, service migration, etc.)

I just have a syncthing folder shared between my VPS, my home server, my desktop, laptop, and phone; it syncs it continuously so a download once syncs it everywhere else. It's basically set it and forget it.

In some countries data consumption is still capped, and reducing bandwidth usage goes a long way in making media consumption more affordable.