Damn, it looks really tempting with the return to low profile camera bumps, but I fear that my fingers will not forgive me if I upgrade to yet another bigger phone - for the third time. Each time I tell myself, this will be the last time I get something larger and I will put my foot down and only upgrade to same size or smaller from now on. And I feel like a fool every time I give in.

No problem! You can tell I went deep down the rabbithole a while back lol - I had to rip my dad’s CD collection and assure him that what came out of the toslink to his DAC was identical coming from a FLAC as would come from a CD player with optical out.

I’m pretty sure if you rip CDs directly to FLAC, it’s a perfect copy assuming you’re using good software. PCM isn’t lossy or lossless because it’s not a compressed format, it’s an uncompressed bitstream. Think of it like the original data. If it was burned to a CD as digital MP3 data and then ripped that to FLAC, then yes you’d be going from lossy compressed to lossless, which would hide the fact that quality was lost when it went to MP3 in the first place.

Just as an example, you can rip a CD directly to FLAC (you should also find and use the correct sample offset for your CD drive), rip the cue sheet for track alignment, then burn the FLAC back to a new CD using the cuesheet (and the correct write offset configuration), and you’ll get a CD with the exact bit for bit pattern of “pits” burned into the data layer.

You can then rip both CDs to a raw uncompressed wav file (wav is basically just a container for PCM data) and then you’ll be able to MD5sum both wav files and see that they are identical.

This is how I test my FLAC rips to make sure I’m preserving everything. This is also how CD checksum databases (like CDDB) work - people across the globe can rip to wav or flac and because it’s the same master of the CD, they’ll get identical checksums, and even after converting the PCM/wav into a flac you are still able to checksum and verify it’s identical bit for bit.

I basically don’t notice that I don’t have a headphone jack. My usb-c adapter is just permanently affixed to my wired IEMs and it basically makes no difference to me if the plug is round or usb-c shaped.

I definitely recommend biting the bullet and getting a good adapter. Since I have a pixel I use the Google one. I made sure my partner got an official apple one for their iPhone since I remember seeing rumors about a volume difference between them if mixed and matched. Aside from Apple shenanigans I haven’t really had an issue with them. I also only charge at night so I never have the problem of needing to charge and listen at the same time.

This is great to hear, dansup has been stretched across so many projects for so long so hopefully this really supercharges pixelfed (and friends) development and helps to increase the diversity of AP servers.

I’m curious to see what suggestions you get. When it comes to “easy to set up”, usually Plex is the answer, and the only major alternative I know of is Jellyfin, which I assume is what you’re referring to when you mention reverse proxies.

I’m even willing to build docker containers, set up wireguard tunnels to a VPS, and reverse proxy through a chain of 2 reverse proxies (haproxy on the VPS and traefik on the local machine which is how I reverse proxy Plex and Jellyfin alike) yet I still use Plex because most of my friends/family prefer the Plex UI (though with how buggy the Plex app has been for some of my iOS users, I think Jellyfin apps could close the gap soon™)

I can’t answer all of your questions, but for a while now I’ve run both just in case of something like this.

For media organization, if you use a renamer, arrstack, or just follow the recommended folder structures in plex’s documentation, it should mostly just work™. I point my Plex and jellyfin to exactly the same folders and it looks like jellyfin matched everything with metadata correctly.

You do have to do SSL yourself if you want https (which you definitely want if you’re exposing it publicly, but you could skip if it’s lan only or accessed through a secure VPN). You should be able to apply just about any reverse proxy that can do letsencrypt pretty easily since there’s nothing particularly unusual about jellyfin. I use traefik and my config is almost copy pasted from their examples.

The apps, imo suck. But if the community has a bad reaction to plex’s changes then there could possibly be a lot more attention / development on jellyfin apps. So personally if Plex forces us to have free content and rentals mixed in with no ability to disable, I’ll just put up with the apps and hope they get better. Imo for Android findroid is the best but it doesn’t have casting support.