It's not that cheap though. My laptops 1 TB SSD can comfortably store 60 GB of AAC files and I forget they even exist, but if those were uncompressed, the 300 GB they take up would be a major problem.
I'm aware - my collection is nearing 1 TB of lossless music at this point.
However I store it on a local NAS as well as a an external SSD (in case I need it in a portable way, which rarely happens) - I opted for an expensive SSD because it's very light, small and portable, but a traditional external drive would handle music just fine if price is a major concern.
At the end everyone has different requirements, but since I consider ripping a huge amount of music a major task I wouldn't want to repeat, I'd make sure I do it right from the beginning - and opting for a lossy format doesn't fit into that idea.
also being lossless you are futureproofed on new formats you might need to convert to.
I mantain both: a tree of lossless files and an exact copy already encoded as 320kbit mp3 that is automatically mantained (just because i can quickly cram those into a usb thumbdrive and they'll play anywhere -- i can't say the same about flac support).
How do you _automatically_ maintain a shadow-library? I always argued against the parallel-collection-approach as you'll likely run into inconsistencies while trying to maintain it manually.
I'm glad iTunes offers to transcode my lossless collection to lossy AAC on the fly before syncing to the iPhone (yes, some people still do that).
Of course my concern is storage in mobile devices. Yours seems to be flac support? However is that really an issue these days? I use ALAC (due to using iOS devices), but even then I never run into compatibility issues. Any worthwhile software/hardware supports either format - with Apple being the big outlier requiring ALAC.
> also being lossless you are futureproofed on new formats you might need to convert to.
Part of my original point was that I've been using AAC exclusively for 15 years now, and with all the content encoded in AAC now I don't see support for it disappearing in the next 15 either.
