I’m ditching streaming services and just going with local music. However all my CDs are converted to either flac or 320kbps mp3 files on my PC and thus far too large for the limited storage I have on my phone.
I was hoping there might be an app that would automatically downconvert to something like 128kbps and then copy over to the Music directory on my phone. A bit like how Calibre can automatically convert eBook files (e.g. mobi to epub) and then send them to your ereader?
For lower bitrates, I’d suggest using a different codec than MP3. Opus is really solid, and at 128 kbps it will probably get you quality similar to MP3 at 192 kbps. Or you could go lower, and 96 kbps with Opus will be similar to MP3 at 128 kbps. I don’t know an app that will do it automatically, but the CLI tools are really simple to use: you point them at the FLAC and tell it the target bitrate and that’s it.
Alternatively, if you have access to a macOS machine, their AAC encoder is really good and likely superior to any MP3 encoder at equivalent bitrates.
This, @Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works.
I’m an audio engineer and can confirm that if you want the best quality audio for the file size, you want Opus. Opus at 128kbps is considered transparent, so it’s roughly as good as 320kbps MP3s, but y’know, less than half the size.
Hey! Good to know about the 128 kbps threshold.
What’s your take on MP3 bitrates? I’ve read some posts online claiming that 320 kbps is overkill most of, if not all of, the time. They claimed that there is little to no gain going above around 220 kbps. In your experience, is there any truth to this?
Generally this is true, but it depends on the encoder used. Back during the huge boom of MP3 popularity in the late 90s and early 00s, it likely did make a difference, so if you’re looking at MP3s that were encoded back then I would go for 320kbps every time just to be safe, but modern encoders generally do much better like you said.
These days if I were encoding an MP3 I’d use LAME at -V0 setting, letting it lower the bitrate where it can without sacrificing quality. That said, per this test from 2014 that I found as a source on Wikipedia, a 96kbps VBR Opus file is at least as good if not better than an MP3 with -V 5 as the setting on LAME with approximately a 135kbps bitrate.
Thanks a lot!
Any thoughts on AAC compared to mp3 and Opus?
AAC is more widely supported than Opus and sits closer to Opus than MP3 in terms of compression efficiency, but still trails Opus in that category.
Still, better than MP3 for sure.
Thanks! So about what I thought I knew. Shocker, that newer formats have better compression yet worse support. Who‘d have thunk?
AAC is generally better than mp3, but idk about Opus.
Not sure if it’s exactly what you’re looking for - but subsonic/airsonic/etc. can do on-the-fly conversions when downloading to mobile devices. There are several mobile apps available that will cache files locally as well.
128kbps mp3s are terrible
192 is okayish imo
You are correct and I don’t normally like to listen to anything less than 320kbps. BUT, my phone does not have expandable memory so it’s hard limited. And where I listen to most of my music while travelling is in the car using the car’s speakers which aren’t going to make much difference listening to 128vs 320. Even when streaming music, I’m not going to get 320. I may go up to 192kbps instead of 128 but I doubt it will make much audible difference with shitty car speakers.
If your device supports it, you might want to encode to Opus instead. Opus produces much higher quality files at much smaller file sizes than MP3.
For example, Opus at 128kbps is considered transparent when compared to the source file. You can probably go down to 64-96kbps when its just for playback in your car.
https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings
As for transcoding them, you might want to check out ffmpegfs: https://github.com/nschlia/ffmpegfs
It can create a “virtual” drive based on your source files and automatically transcodes them when you drag & drop files from there onto your device.
Can you stream from your pc? I set up Jellyfin and Tailscale, and all my music (and movies and tv shows) are on my computer, accessible from anywhere.
I don’t want to be reliant on an internet connection to play music. Hence, why I prefer everything to be local on my phone. I also don’t want to open our home server up to the outside world.
Both fair concerns. Plus then your server must always be on.
What about security? How easy is it to crack?
What u mean to crack
Well, it’s not great to take an already compressed audiostream like 320kbps mp3, and then compress it again. Use your FLACs if possible. Then, I’d recommend that you use .ogg - they give better compression (smaller files), but with better sound than mp3…
There’s a lot of apps out there, but AFAIK not anyone who does this automatically for you.
I don’t know about automatic, but I also have music locally on my phone after moving away from streaming services.
I use fre:ac to convert from FLAC to MP3, and then just save it in a separate folder. Then when I’m done I move the folder to the phone and delete it from the computer so I just have FLAC on my computer.
Not automatic, but that’s how I usually do it.
not automatic but simple enough and very efficient; I’d use ffmpeg
It would be simple to throw a script together that would take a flac or whatever as input, reencode to whatever with ffmpeg, then move the result to a specific location.
I’m in a similar boat to you. I ripped almost all of my CDs to 320kbps mp3s for portability, but then I wanted to put all of them (a substantial number) plus a bunch more (my partner’s collection) on a physically tiny USB stick (that I already had) to just leave plugged into our car stereo’s spare port. I had to shrink the files somehow to make them all fit, so I used ffmpeg and a little bash file logic to keep the files as mp3s, but reduce the bitrate.
128kbps mp3 is passable for most music, which is why the commercial industry focused on it in the early days. However, if your music has much “dirty” sound in it, like loud drums and cymbals or overdriven electric guitars, 128kbps tends to alias them somewhat and make them sound weird. If you stick to mp3 I’d recommend at least 160kbps, or better, 192kbps. If you can use variable bit rate, that can be even better.
Of course, even 320kbps mp3 isn’t going to satisfy audiophiles, but it sounds like you just want to have all your music with you at all times as a better alternative to radio, and your storage space is limited, similar to me.
As regards transcoding, you may run into some aliasing issues if you try to switch from one codec to another without also dropping a considerable amount of detail. But unless I’ve misunderstood how most lossy audio compression works, taking an mp3 from a higher to a lower bitrate isn’t transcoding, and should give you the same result as encoding the original lossless source at the lower bitrate. Psychoacoustic models split a sound source into thousands of tiny component sounds, and keep only the top X “most important” components. If you later reduce that to the top Y most important components by reducing the bitrate (while using the same codec), shouldn’t that be the same as just taking the top Y most important components from the original, full group?
Not automatic (I think) and a bit clunky but the Strawberry music player does have a transcode feature so you could select music files and transcode them a certain way output to another folder. It’s not something I ever do but I did a quick test to a USB drive and it seems to work okay. It’s an option if you opt to use a gui to click through.
OTOH if you’re happy using the terminal and/or scripting then ffmpeg would be a better bet.
PS - Strawberry does have a panel where it lists “Devices” and maybe your phone could show up there and the transcoding would work a bit more automatically, wasn’t able to test that here.
This might be a bit overkill for what you want but you could try using a selfhosted music server like navidrome and streaming to your phone. I use symfonium on on phone which can be configured to request the streamed music to be transcoded to a smaller size for streaming from mobile network or for caching it on your phones storage for offline listening.
Given that symfonium supports a lot of self hosted media providers from which to pull, you could also try sharing your music locally using samba. I’m not sure if the transcoding still works in that case though (it would obviously have to be done on your phone)
If your files are flac and you just want to.copy some files you could try Mp3fs
That’ll make your files appear to be MP3 when you access them
You could them use a file transfer mechanism to read them from the mp3fs location onto your phone with - kinda - one step.
This is what I use
You can use Plex to stream music from your own server. The mobile app is called Plexamp, and it’s pretty great.
I don’t want to stream at all because I don’t want to be reliant on having an internet connection :)
Might not be the most convenient option depending on your personal use-case, but have you considered a dedicated audio device? I personally got a refurbished LG V30 because I came across a YT vid while looking for cheap options for having a dedicated “mp3” player to keep archived/favorite episode of podcasts, audiobooks, and music. Seems there is a decent fanbase of folks that love the 3.5mm DAC that phone has (of course has Bluetooth too). It also has microSD slot. Got a 512GB card (can use up to 2TB which I might do at some point). Most of the music I have on it is flac where possible. I keep it offline and just transfer files via USB, but could use wifi to sync with PC if I wanted to at some point. Shit lasts a pretty long time with wifi/bluetooth off only using the headphone jack (helps that the battery was replaced by the refurb).
There are also lots of cheaper Android-based players (I got one before I came across the vid on the V30) but can have some amount of malware and no easy access to their firmware or communities that can advise custom ROMs to safely flash something clean and/or newer. When I got my no-name device I just side-loaded apks to avoid giving access to my Google account (though I plan to keep my V30 offline after I got the last updates for the OS and LG apps). I just wanted to have something that I only use for local audio and just keep it in my car or backpack and have access to the three apps I like (Musicolet for music, Podcast Addict for podcasts, and Smart AudioBook Player for my audiobooks).
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