Quick, technical question about downloaded music

[smileyhead]

I currently have about 300 songs saved on my PC and phone. Some of the older ones are 128k MP3s, most of them are 190k MP3s, some of the newer ones are 320k MP3s and like 13 are FLACs.
I heard that MP3 files lose quality over time but FLACs do not. If that's true, I want to redownload all of them in FLAC. How can I do that using the least disk space possible?
I'm asking because when I downloaded a song from YouTube with a downloading site in FLAC, it was 60MB, but when I recorded the same song from my sound card using Audacity, it was only 40. That method however would take much more time.

 

[Chary]

First off, I think the "downloaded files lose quality over the years" was a huge meme.

Second off, if you're downloading your music in FLAC off YouTube, you're really not getting anything noteworthy of a change. YouTube still compresses its audio into trash tier level.

Check out something called Spek, for one, cuz it'll detail you the actual quality of the song files you have, rather than some downloader site's pseudo FLAC. The large downloads are just part of having higher quality music.

 

[FAST6191]

A file is a file is a file. If they are corrupting then you have bigger issues.
It might be that you started to get used to having higher and higher quality files and thus could notice some issues with badly encoded files/highly compressed ones. Relatively speaking that would mean a reduction in apparent quality to you. Similarly to me loading up a blurry mess of a N64 slideshow today and wondering how I ever spent as many hours as I did playing them.
However most people's ears, headphones (especially ear buds) and adc in their device that pumps out the sound makes this less likely for me.

If you make a FLAC/lossless recording of and already trashed audio file* is not going to improve things any more than taking my expensive DSLR and taking a picture of a 1980s photocopy is going to restore that to the quality of the original source.

*and while youtube works for the remnants of my hearing I do have to recognise that they don't have quality in mind, to say nothing of a lot of legacy stuff being uploaded in a time when people assumed that the quality was as good as it was going to get and playing to that, and then we got the &fmt=18.

If you want then https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html and find a suitable song on a compatible platform. Works a treat if you just want something to listen to on your phone.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I currently have about 300 songs saved on my PC and phone. Some of the older ones are 128k MP3s, most of them are 190k MP3s, some of the newer ones are 320k MP3s and like 13 are FLACs.
I heard that MP3 files lose quality over time but FLACs do not. If that's true, I want to redownload all of them in FLAC. How can I do that using the least disk space possible?
I'm asking because when I downloaded a song from YouTube with a downloading site in FLAC, it was 60MB, but when I recorded the same song from my sound card using Audacity, it was only 40. That method however would take much more time.

Digital data doesn't wear out, the storage medium it's stored on can however.
But if you want high quality small rips you can download FLACs and convert them to 128kbps Opus (or if you can find them already in Opus then even better)