Audio files are tiny, itty bitty things - even uncompressed. If you have the ability to use a lossless file at 0 extra cost...why not? Massive streaming services like Spotify don't obviously, the economics are way different.
I have a flac collection that I was streaming, and I ended up writing some software to encode the entire library to opus because when you are driving around you never know how good your bandwidth will be. Since moving to opus I never have my music cut off anymore. Even with the nice stereo in my car I don't notice any quality problems. There are definitely reasons to not stream wav or flac around all the time.
Because it’s lossy, period. You may not notice it if you’re not looking hard enough; but you wouldn’t accept a .zip file of a word doc that was missing letters or words in the document. You’d use lossless compression.
I’m not saying there’s no use for opus- just that if your goal is a high quality listening experience, that ain’t it.
That's like saying cars are crap because it's not as powerful as a truck. Both are completely different classes of vehicles optimizing for different use cases. So are lossy vs lossless codecs, you can't just say one is superior to the other without specifying the use case.
For instance, I've got a navidrome instance with all my music library accessible from anywhere in the world trough my phone. However there are situations where I may not have internet any connection, so I use the app on the phone (Tempo) to mark the songs I want to be downloaded and available even when offline, but my phone storage wouldn't hold even a quarter of my playlists if I went with the original encode of the songs (mostly lossless flacs), so I instead set it to download a transcoded Opus 128kbps version of it all and it fits on my phone with room to spare. It sound pretty damn good trough my admittedly average IEMs and I get the benefit of offline playback. Even if you somehow had the absolute best playback system connected to my phone you might be able to tell the difference, but it beats not having to rely on internet connectivity.
That's a bad illustration. The letters are there.. they're just slightly lower rez. Like going from a 256x256 space per letter to 128x128. Is there a difference? sure. Can you read it perfectly fine.. of course.
You could probably argue that these are handwritten letters but the argument still stands.
If you decide to stream with a lower bitrate in Plexamp, it transcodes to Opus.
You should not encode the files, just use Plex or Jellyfin and choose a lower bitrate when playing with your phone. Jellyfin uses AAC and Plexamp uses Opus.
Tell that to some of my 24bit/192kHz flac files. About 300 megabytes each. Not nice to stream with plexamp using my 40 Mbps upstream... Easy to encode in opus though.
