Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Why MP3? It's simply not a great codec to target. If you have a music server, then why not flac?" I still encode to plain old 128k mp3. Here's why ... First, I keep the WAV originals and those are what I listen to on my music system, in my music server, etc. Second, if I am using the mp3s it is because I am going to some unknown place to interface with some unknown tool to play these - let's just make life simple an…
I'm really sorry for dogpiling on your setup here, but why keep wav files rather than flac? Flac files are lossless compression, so you can always get the exact same wav out of them, they take less disk space and they can hold Metadata. Flac support is also really common these days.
FLAC is well-supported. But, PCM RIFF WAV files are triv-i-al. Any CS101 student can write a parser. They don’t need decoding.
2:1 lossless compression is nice. It’s quite a technical feat.
Meanwhile, as an old software engineer, I focus pretty hard on technical simplicity. And, the complexity ratio of PCM vs. pretty much else everything is a a very, very small number. Very small :p