I don’t know what to tell you then. 🤷‍♂️

I agree. I spun up Navidrome because it’s free. Plexamp does require Plex Pass (which I pay for, but others don’t)

And I said offline syncing a playlist (1-2Gb), not 400Gb. Max 1-2Gb. I have 1.8Tb of music that I can stream in the rural midwest at any given moment providing I have a signal, and about 3Gb synced to my phone when I don’t have a signal. Plex is smart enough to buffer the next few song in your playback queue so it will play seamlessly through bad cellular coverage. Spotify and Tidal work the same way. Is selecting a subset of Spotify’s catalog annoying?

What problem? 200 tracks times 4mb/track equals 1Gb. If you can’t spare a couple gigs of storage, you need to delete some apps off your phone.

I store everything on an openmediavault nas and serve up using Plex, Navidrome, Audiobookshelf, and Calibre, all running in Docker containers.

I live in the rural midwest with spotty cell service. All of those services support manual offline syncing to store music on your phone. I set Plexamp to stream lossy over cellular, and it doesn’t take long to cache an entire playlist when I do have a signal.

1.8Tb stored on an 8Tb NAS drive. Plenty of room for more music hoarding.

In my case, a self hosted streaming server works wonders. Plex with Pleaxamp, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Airsonic, any of them will stream to your phone while out and about.

I really hope this is satire. If not, you’re way off the mark. Lossy files do not intrinsically suffer any kind of bit rot. Bits are bits, and your storage interface doesn’t have any clue what those bits mean. I have MP3s from the late 90s that have been stored on the cheapest CD-Rs you can imagine, that still play perfect.

Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.

We hosted parties for our daughters when they were teens (15-16). They weren’t big - maybe 8 to 10 friends. No alcohol, but lots of food off the grill. On occasion, we let them drink alcohol with us after they turned 18 at home with no friends, which is legal in our state.