which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
Removed by mod