memes

Um, .wav is a lossless format. It's just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it's stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.

The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.

I would disagree with this. It isn't really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.

What I've noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.

I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.

Please do forget about .ape. Proprietary, obscure format. Only advantage is that under some circumstances it can get you higher compression rates than flac. But it's way more resource intensive to decode so that advantage is really more theoretical. Use flac, forget ape.

Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.

The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It's exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.

Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.

You'd probably notice it with better audio gear.

The Jukebox predated the iPod by a couple of years. I didn't mind the size and I had a backpack with a built-in case for a CD player with a little portal for the headphone wire, so I could put it right in there while I was walking to class (I was in college at the time).

I also got a second gen iPod for free as part of a pyramid scheme that went totally wrong. You had to sign up for a service to get a code and if you got enough codes, you got a free iPod. But you could cancel the service right away. More importantly, the codes could be used by multiple people and the system would accept it due to whatever crappy coding they did. So people would share their codes and I was one of the people near the top of the pyramid that got enough codes to do it before they figured it out.

I also had the trendy mp3 player pre-iPod, the Diamond Rio.

Looking back on it, I have no idea why I had so many mp3 players.