Yeah and Apple did a yeoman's job of making iTunes unusable. It's like, "you speak XML. Why does it take a 230MB database to span 120GB of audio, Apple? In PLAINTEXT?

I transcoded my CDs to MP3 at 192kbps because in 2004 on a Gen 1 ipod, 192kbps was the sweet spot for playback. Sounded better than anything else because of the limits of the DACs. I was mostly happy until 2018 because the difference between 192 and 320 is negligible. Then I made the mistake of listening to kind of good headphones which pushed me into buying stupidly good headphones and then buying brainslugs and hot-rodding them to make things even worse. At which point oh fuck yes you can tell the difference between FLAC and literally anything else with no real difficulty at all. Then I got off my lazy ass and hit my obnoxiously good monitors through a decent DAC and yeah, once you hear the difference you can't do Youtube if you have half a choice.

But if I hadn't removed the beam from mine own eye I'd probably still be fat'n'happy with shitty earbuds because they're plenty good enough for Spotify.

I already had a Plex server so Tidal was worth checking out. I use mostly Tidal now for music. Sometimes Bandcamp. I'd been stuck in my own shit for so many years when What.CD died that Tidal lets me explore. Especially since T-Mobile doesn't hit me for data while it does for Plex. So my shit is scattered across Bandcamp and Plex but maybe 70,80% of it is on Tidal so I use Tidal to find other stuff. It's expensive but it also remunerates artists at the highest rate and I drive a Porsche and have thousand dollar headphones so I'm kind of obligated to pay more.