I use FLAC for long-term storage, 256kbps Ogg when transcoding for mobile devices.

Opus is the best lossy codec in terms of efficiency, but many devices/apps don’t properly support it.

Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.

So there would be no practical benefits of switching?

I understood some of those words…

Not self hosting - just using the web app.

Also PairDrop. I tested a few of these sharing apps and found this one to be slightly better for reasons that I can no longer remember.

Nah they got it right the first time.

And LosslessCut is a ffmpeg frontend, so that checks out.

For your use case, I’d go with LosslessCut as opposed Shotcut, Openshot, etc.

The reason being that it is much simpler and faster to use, and generally results in smaller filesizes because you aren’t having to re-encode from scratch.

Going from 192kbps to 320kbps would be audibly negligible unless you used a really bad codec to begin with, in which case adding AI into the mix would likely just compound the problem.

Probably not even worth it, tbh.

If I were you, I would stick to streaming in that case.

However, if you’re dead set on storing files locally and there’s no other option but to transcode, then use 128kbps Opus instead of AAC - assuming that iPhones support it (I haven’t checked). It’s a lot more efficient.

A good converter program to use is fre:ac but don’t ask me for an iOS only app because I’m not an Apple guy at all.

Converting from one lossy codec another isn’t generally recommended, plus you aren’t likely to save that much disk space by converting to AAC.

10 GB is actually pretty small for a local music collection, quite honestly. If I were you, I would try to expand your storage capacity instead of wasting time, and potentially audio quality, by transcoding.

Why would I use KDE when Gnome is better? 😉

The GSConnect extension enables the same functionality on Gnome, btw.