Compressed music had a place, but in 2023, with 5G, unlimited data and streaming services, there's really no reason not to go lossless.
ALAC/FLAC files are pretty small, there's few downsides to going lossless. To be fair, there arent that many upsides either, but you at least skip one recompression step when sending the audio over BT.
The problem with AWS is the temptation to use lambdas when streaming will keep your program running. Adding on egress costs, as parent points out, makes what could be a simple streaming server quite expensive. Better to avoid AWS for this reason. Personally I've had great success with my own streaming server I made a few years to learn Rust running on a raspberry pi that I leave plugged in at home.
The files aren't small, storage size on a phone is still small especially when photo/video is competing and is taking more space, so the same real downside remains, and there are still plenty of places without any fast data connection even when most of the time you have 5g. Re recompress- ok, but is it a real downside, can anyone notice?
More than a factor 10 for a single song. For 50 songs that would become 2Gb. I love flac as a format but i would never recommend it as a general format for my grandmother.
I was suffering from low disk space for a few years and then happened to notice last month that 2TB NVME SSDs are $75-$125 depending on speed. They are all much faster than an old drive.
If you haven't looked in five years (like myself) I recommend doing that. No one needs to suffer on short disk space any longer. Don't know what "grandma" uses but it is unlikely that audio is a significant burden anymore when people routinely shoot HD+ video.
Also if compressing, Opus sounds better and is smaller.
A 1TB microsd card can store 2-3000 CDs worth of FLAC files. Or an 8TB SATA SSD can store 10s of thousands of CDs. You basically can't fill up a modern drive with (legally acquired) music.
A 1TB MicroSD card is still like $100 compared to getting a 64GB for like $3. I'd prefer to save $97 and delete some data that I probably won't even notice. I'll also get better battery life when picking a codec which my device has hardware decoders for.
And I get that the 1TB for $100 is cheaper per gig, but if I never even needed those gigs in the first place my overall cost is still cheaper to get the $3 one.
ALAC/FLAC files are pretty small, there's few downsides to going lossless. To be fair, there arent that many upsides either, but you at least skip one recompression step when sending the audio over BT.