Yeah I use foobar and it works fine, but it still sucks and still affects us that the culture is streaming based. It’s better when your habits aren’t niche and you’re not always fighting against the norm.

Before you comment I’m begging you to take the parent comment in the general spirit of digital “ownership” having taken over the culture and not point out that Winamp technically still exists.

We gave up Winamp for this.

I also went through the phase where I thought I was an audiophile/videophile and everything I collected needed to be in ultra high quality. Eventually I realized it was stupid and now I spend a third as much money on storage and still have perfectly fine media that I have no issues with in practice despite the flaws I’m supposed to see in theory.

you’ll do nothing but bloat the file size

That’s very wrong. Going from h.264 to h.265 cuts file size down to 25-50% of the original. That’s what the HE is for in HEVC.