That a local library can be available anywhere at a suitable file size without any manual step or need to store in different sizes/formats. Remember, we were all coming from a personal CD library with single CD‘s we took with us in a car or on holiday.
Sure, we can have that from online services today, but those are not as good sounding at home, don’t contain certain releases abroad, only available in our collection and don’t have the sort criterias we use (instead of just finding something by name or in a playlist from an online service).
A Samsung T7 in either 2TB or 4TB fits in your pocket. I have a 1TB memory card in my phone. When your library (or a robust subset) is always in your pocket, you don’t need all that farting around.
I have too many personal stereo objects in my collection. Portable music has always been my thing. I don’t need internet to use it.
And if you convert something to mp3 why on earth would you convert it back to hirez? That’s foolishness.
You may have gotten something wrong, I don’t have to manually convert anything forth and back. Jriver
provides my local hires library over internet and the tracks are on the fly converted to MP3 just in the moment of playing. They stay hires locally and no other constant MP3 version is created.
My library extends all the time, so to put the 20TB reduced to MP3 (or a subset of it) on a mobile storage would be a much less convenient thing for me and unnecessary work when I’m able to stream my complete library online on the road as I’d do at home.
I am hooked on Friends and Family guy, an old streaming service I had would show family guy from about 11pm all the way through to about 4am, at the time I was really struggling with sleep and would watch it when I was awake, it became a bit of a valued routine.
Couple years later, the streaming service lost rights to those series. Now I was paying monthly, didn’t own anything off them, so the loss wasn’t huge. But it showed me that I could never rely on a streaming service.
Also, I tend to listed to quite left field music that is very often not even on streaming services.
So since that time, I now collect whatever I can on vinyl as I just adore the format and it’s my primary listening choice. Along with the physical purchase, you usually get access to a download code, I normally download FLAC, I’ve then setup a personal cloud server where I can download my library remotely, or stream it if I want to. That’s all done through Plex which has come a long way in the last 5 years, the audio side is far better than it used to be, especially on IOS rather than Android.
I will never rely on any streaming service, I don’t trust them, they just don’t suit my needs. But a physical vinyl copy will always be my first preference.
I use spotiify to evaluate a track or album before purchasing, but not for any kind of real listening.
I use Qobuz and love it. No more buying CDs. Dropped Tidal because I didn’t want to mess with MQA. In the future, I may use nativeDSD to purchase DSD files for true 1-bit play back.