I have nearly 2 TB of discographies I used to store since the early 2000s. Most of it is either FLAC or Mp3 320 kpbs and it's been carefully labeled and arranged through many years. At some point it was very useful because I travelled a lot out of town.

It's been a lot since I don't listen to any offline music so I'm thinking of using that HDD space in something else. Do you see any value in keeping FLAC and Mp3 music nowadays?

 

Save it for the time where you'll be unable to pay for your ISP anymore. Don't think that's unlikely cause you never know.

 

My vision

1 FLAC is for only 2 reasons : archive (original bit per bit) AND OR audiophile listening (witch mean around 2 000+ bucks listening room, amp, speakers ...) or VERY good headphones only in a calm room.
Every other listening situation : lossy format is enough

In my situation, i don't need FLAC at all.

About local files, it is another thing.
Because sometimes i just want to put some music in my car without any other sound source than car radio, i have a bunch of CD or usb key for this purpose only.
They stay in the car.

For anything else : Spotify and Youtube

Because i'm near 50 years old, i listened to THOUSANDS albums.
And if i needed to keep them ... it would be hard AND useless.
Even by keeping only my favs, it is already several hundreds albums.

I tried local files road, but it is just too time AND ressources consuming.
Backup included.

I prefer Spotify recommandations, to discover new music, than storing music.
As a side note, i store my spotify favs in a local Excel file once in a while (using online converter).

YES may be one day Spotify may disappear.
YES some albums are not on Spotify (a good reason to keep local files).

But at the end, i ended up listening to music a little on local files, most on Spotify and some on Youtube (for remixes and such).
I will keep what i have (not much) locally BUT will not stack another layer
Like i stopped buying CD many years ago.


My vision : keep files locally in 320 MP3 only
You can re encode from flac and reduce size by around 3 times

Another consideration : what are you REALLY listening to ?

Example : i only love ONE Meshuggah album (Destroy erase improve) and some singles.
I will NEVER keep their full discography Only what i like.

Seeing things like this is going to help you "making some room" AND keep your favorites, re discover forgotten gems and such.
Those files are not only local files : they have an history AND your work on them

Don't throw them all BUT do another "final" filtering before "freezing" them as they are.

My two cents

 

I went 100% local -> 100% Spotify -> 93% Spotify -> 100% local. I can't be bothered with music disappearing because of license deals expiring or streaming service wars anymore (that was 2016, situation may be less ridiculous these days). +1 for trimming the fat from your collection. If you don't like something now, 99.99% chance you won't like it in the future. I encode everything as ~224-248kbps AACs (VBR q100 setting with Apple's encoder).

 

I don't keep them FLAC all the time but only download album that I really want to study and write journal about it. I limit that amount to 10 albums max and it will consistently get changed. It will stay for a month or so and then get deleted whenever new album I want to listen to coming in. Been doing this for a long time now and the system works great, for me.

I do most of my music listening through streaming services, that also works seamlessly with my Audio Receiver unit on my Hi-Fi system, so I rarely play physical format (vinyl, cassette, cd) audio for me anymore, will only play them if there's a guest and they want to listen to some of my rare collections. For work, whenever I needed songs for reference, I just download that FLAC files and keep it together in the project folder I'm working on. I usually use the ADPTR Metric AB and load them straight from the project main folder so if I opened them say 1 or 2 years later, every file is there. Whenever I move the folder, they all go together but still needed to redirect the plugin to new location sometimes. That's just it. Apart from that I don't see why I should keep FLAC files. I used to have big collection like yours on my Synology NAS that can be accessed online through phone whenever I go, but now Spotify got everything so I cleared the space and filled it with Kontakt library I don't use .

 

I used to archive with MP3 (256/320) but got tired of listening to artifacting from the compression - especially in the high end. I generally do not bother getting album tuneage that I do not want to keep and have moved to FLAC for archiving for the last few years. Since I have qobuz as my streaming source (moved from spotify due to quality issues) I can record stuff directly in 24bit/96khz. The quality concerns that plagued spotify are no longer an issue and FLAC is the perfect tool to get those tasty sounding hi-rez files down to a manageable size for storage.

 

Starting from 95 or so I converted most of my vinyls with Sound Forge first then with Cool Edit Pro.
Almost useless work, because many years later I decided to replace them all with downloaded version from different sources, much better quality than vinyl rips (I fck hate those pops that are so difficult to eliminate completely).
Usually I find 192kb more than enough to encode rock or disco, while with certain classical music 320kb or flac if possible, and from CDs or CD rips.

I know that now there is internet, but considering that I almost filled completely my "life library ost" I'll keep mine. I do always prefer to be offline, while discovering new things with yt and the like.
Your library is 2TB, not so huge considering technology at this time.

 

I'd not trust any cloud and especially streaming services to keep what I love. I store everything locally.
That being said I do keep only what I listen to. No archiving.