Why 24 bit audio and anything over 48k is not only worthless, but bad for music.

[Ryokan]

I recently discovered a lot of new great indie-bands (unsigned as well as proper indie, not affiliated to one of the big labels) who only release their music as 320kbps AAC, no hi-res available. I don't notice anything missing or wrong in the sound, just brilliant new music.

An artist I like posted music files on Bandcamp years ago but only in high bitrate mp3, I sent him an email asking for flac, he replied - why do you want flac? I thought if a musician thinks mp3 is all you need they must be good enough.

And yes, hi-res files are rather large. Storage space is not overly expensive, but making proper backups for archival & cold storage and reorganising music file folders/libraries is very slow with all those big hi-res files.

For me it's a throw back to when Daps had little storage, 2gb or less. I needed to choose carefully which albums I wanted on them. Once I bought two 8gb daps and stored half alphabetically on one and the rest on the other, which wasn't ideal. Now I have up to 512gb cards for stability and have lots of space but still prefer to load mp3 files over an album getting on for 1gb.