Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive
My wife does that too. I don’t mind some audio quality loss because i hate the idea of my music taking up tons of unnecessary drive space when I can’t even tell the difference between 192kbps and 320kbps bitrate anyway. But i like controlling the quality reduction myself so it’s at least consistent, so i’ll usually download higher quality rips and then scale them down. Also, YouTube uploads can be inconsistent with their volume levels which is very annoying.
Use replay gain (track based), it helps a lot, you just need an audio player that supports it. Foobar2000 does, and also allows you to apply replay gain to any download music you have.