Almost no one can, or have equipment that can make the difference. That being said, the difference between an old mp3 and a new one is sometimes noticeable at the same bitrate. The encoding algorithm has improved a quite lot since the late 90s. I bet a lot of people who say they hear the difference think about those old encodes.
I keep flacs as a master format that I make new encodes from when I want it on my phone and such though.
Nah. I don’t bother with that. I can’t listen to unlimited amounts of music anyway, and buying fewer albums I care more about makes me listen to them more instead, I’d say. I already have a massive music catalog going back to the early 2000s when I bought CDs, pirated a lot and just kept all of it on my NAS.
Mostly Qobuz.
Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp
When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.
Well. If you’re not streaming why have such a service in the first place? If I didn’t stream remotely with Plex (and share with my friends and family) I’d just go back to running Kodi on my htpc like I did ten years ago.
I, at least, managed to get most of my family to switch. I told them it was the only way they’d get pictures and updates of my son. The one small victory I’m satisfied with.
A quick search tells me that DuckDuckGo and other larger partners will retain access, for now.
It was kind of easy for me, as I already used Plex for video, but Plexamp has been such an amazing experience for rediscovering my own music. The radios, sonic matching and DJ algorithms are fantastic. I’m sure there’s other similar solutions, but it’s really worth investing in, imho. There’s currently a lot to be desired with the library management, but the player experience is worth the downsides for me.