It's hard to imagine not having an unlimited cell phone plan if you do any streaming at all, including Spotify/Pandora/etc., maps, Waze, podcasts and whatever else. There are four phones on our plan and each use anywhere between 15 and 40 Gb per month of data. Who uses voice minutes anymore?
If you're on a limited data plan, and even paying for Sirius on top of that, why not just amass a collection of audio on your phone instead of streaming, on a mSD card if internal memory isn't sufficient? You can hold weeks worth of audio on a sub-$20 mSD card, even more if MP3 instead of flac. You can have a lifetime supply (literally more music than you can listen to for the rest of your life) on a stack of mSD cards smaller than a matchbox. There are tons of jukebox type audio playback apps where you can categorize by genre if you like.
I do. A phone just isn't my primary data device when there's laptops, desktops, tablets, smart TVs. I'm near wifi anywhere but driving, don't have long commutes to burn up minutes talking (hands free) while driving, and don't stream while I drive, so am well under 1GB data per month on my phone.
Pandora is actually working out pretty good for me. I live in a small town and don't spend a bunch of time behind the wheel so as it turns out the 1GB a month is more than I need even with Pandora set to the highest bit rate. At this point I doubt I'll be subscribing to Sirius again.
Agreed. I have 5 numbers on our plan . 2 associated with very busy professionals, I pay about $ 235/month and that includes monthly payments for 3 phones.
That's fine if you have the time and want to go through, sort and load songs from music you've collected....or you could just fire up Pandora. I like the randomness of it.
Just about every music player app has a random mode, so you still just fire it up... seems like marketing has made you forget this has been true even before most people had cell phones, even the portable MP3 players of 15+ years ago could do this, just didn't have enough memory capacity for several thousand songs at the time like a mSD card (or more expensive phone with more built-in memory) can today.
Depends on one's age, I suppose. By the time most of us hit early 40s, we can't hear much past 15 kHz. Modern audio codecs such as AAC do a pretty good job representing such frequency range using VBR of 192 kbps. Most codecs are considered transparent at bit rate of 192 kbps and higher, meaning vast majority will not be able to tell them apart from uncompressed source.
While I am a big proponent of using a dedicated tool for the job (ie. dedicated audio player instead of your phone) for the reasons you mentioned, my guess is that a "very busy professional" will not have time to or remember to keep adding new songs to his SD card, so it won't be long before his portable library is outdated. Streaming services don't have that problem.
I recall clearly, sorting files and downloading songs to an MP3 player and more recently, just putting them on a thumb drive and plugging it straight into the USB port in the console... definitely better sound quality but why do all of that sorting and downloading, file transfers etc... unless you like that sort of thing. In fact, I still pop in a CD or two of some music I really like.
You are in vast minority.
A lot of people encode at much higher bit rates without ever doing an ABX test to see if they can really tell the difference instead of just 'thinking' they can. Or maybe they're just feeling superior by doing so. I don't dispute that there are some people, like you, who can tell the difference, so you should definitely adjust the rate based on what your ears are telling you.
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