Music and what to use

Published: February 23, 2026 • Reading Time: 6 min

Table of Contents

After a quick talk a few days about why I believe that Talos Linux is one of the best solutions for a kubernetes cluster, deep diving into more standards (and opening a new category for standards) is the next logical step for me. The first that to me as an audiophile is important to talk about are all of the different codecs (lossy & lossless) and why nearly all of them do no longer matter nowadays.

Historic overview of recorded music

The old analog days

As most, if not all, here know, the origin in music recording has been in the analog days. One of the first ones were phonographs, like the phonograph cylinder. These were barely able to work for voice. If you are interested and the origin of audio recording (and playback), I recommend checking out videos like this one by Miron Ghiu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vqvq-f-UtU

The analog recordings we are still comfortable with and use quite a lot are vinyl. Original vinyl were still really similar to how the cylinders worked as they basically were flattened cylinders. It took decades for what we now know as vinyl to fully appear. These work quite interestigly as they have stereo sound by moving the needle in two different directions, up/down and left/right. If you want to see how this tech works, I definitely recommend https://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html This is also the reason why many audiophiles still love vinyl as they work totally different from digital audio. In digital audio, the mixer can artificially increase the perceived volume by huge differences between quiet and loud parts. As vinyl store this physically, the louder something is, the more space it takes. Therefore vinyl suffer much less from maximum volume and generally are more reasonable. An interesting example of how the feature of the moving needle has been used are old school pressings of Slayer’s “Reign in Blood”. Here the last groove has made into an infinite, closed loop. So if you play the vinyl, you could get endless rain.

The move to digital

But not all vinyl do is good, like how much care they need to work properly and have quite high costs. Companies like Sony and Philips tried to solve these issues by introducing PCM and CDs. Many nice features of CDs are the fact that the audio is digital and there is no noise floor, you can embed data about where songs are and skip them much quicker and they hold more audio data. A standard 12 inch vinyl generally holds around 22 minutes per side as holding more can and does lead to issues, like the grooves pushing into each other. For this reason, if you wanted to have 30 minutes per side, you generally start losing fidelity. A CD for example can store up to around 74 minutes of “full” quality, so 16 bit at 44.1 kHz and 1.411kb/s. The bitrate is actually higher than FLAC and basically WAV quality.

Storage is limited

The amount of storage used by a full CD did become a bit of an issue as most humans can’t hear most of the additional information. But people wanted to be able to share audio in some ways, like being able to transmit high quality audio over ISDN. This also has lead to the rise of mp3 players, like the iPod, music streaming and so on. MP3 made a personal music collection possible

If you want a full deep dive into the history of mp3: https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/magazin/panorama/2025/30-years-of-mp3.html

What now?

The state of high quality audio and lower cost drives

By the 2000s, it became much more feasible for people to obtain high-capacity hard drives. High-end headphones and speakers, like the Sennheiser HD 600, also became more accessible. At the same time, MP3s—especially the heavily compressed files shared on peer-to-peer services like Napster—revealed their flaws. Too much acoustic information was missing, leading to metallic, “swishy” sounding audio that was glaringly obvious on good headphones.

This led to more people wanting exact, direct copies of their CDs. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) arrived and solved these issues perfectly. FLAC is a bit-perfect copy of the original uncompressed audio (WAV) but manages to shrink the file size by up to 50%. For storage, this is incredible: a full CD shrinks from 700MB down to about 350MB without losing a single drop of audio quality. FLAC also supports robust metadata, so you automatically see the correct track name, album, cover art, and artist embedded in the file. Finally, FLAC is fully open-source, so there are no licensing costs involved.

When you have the storage space, FLAC makes a digital audio collection perfect. It provides the original studio audio in the lowest possible storage size alongside all your metadata. If you have terabytes of storage, this is what you want to use for archiving.

The need for quick and quality

While FLAC is great for home storage, file size became an issue again with the rise of modern mobile internet, streaming, and services like Skype and YouTube. People wanted high-quality audio but with little to no latency and minimal bandwidth usage. This is why Opus was created. Opus is a highly intelligent, modern lossy codec designed to replace MP3. A few aspects of what Opus does that really help with storage are:

Opus is fantastic because it allows you to have a high-quality audio collection universally across all your portable devices.

What I recommend to use

Well this part is pretty simple with all the background information you now have!

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