What kind of pre-enshittification tech do you all use? Stuff where ppl look at you like you’re an alien b/c nobody does it that any more.
Me ->
Oldschool offline mp3 player rather than Spottify or other streaming or phone app, to use when running.
Paper books rather than e-books.
DRM free games I buy on GOG to avoid rootkitting my own comp.
Wired speakers rather than smart speakers.
Old ass pre-connected car.
Prob more but I can’t think of it all rn.
No prob! And if you’re maxing out any lossy codec, that’s the point where your only intention is to make a file smaller than you can do with lossless, while still having no audible degradation between that lossy copy and the uncompressed or lossless original file, although you could also settle for transparency in the case of codecs like Opus or even Vorbis where their max bitrate is higher than their transparency rate for even smaller files.
In the case of older codecs like MP3, supposedly its transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s CBR is also its max bitrate, but there’s decades of debate over whether 320kbit/s CBR or V0 VBR is superior for that codec, such as this HA thread from 2008 on the matter. As for MD/ATRAC, its transparency bitrate, and also its max bitrate and the native bitrate for the MD format, is 292kbit/s CBR.
For the curious, the two bitrates for MD/ATRAC that fall below its transparency bitrate are 132kbit/s (MD LP2) and 66kbit/s (MD LP4).