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?
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.
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.
128kbps mp3s are terrible
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.
