My apologies...

I was using ballpark figures in my head, while working on a particularly gnarly job - so my math was somewhat out - oopsy.

But for streaming to a car/non-audio-friendly situation, such as boggo headphones on a train etc, 128-256 is acceptable, but for proper listening, through a hifi or reference-ish headphones, you probably want local FLAC files, rather than streamed FLACs (bit for bit in terms of data usage vs sound quality).

That said, my FLAC rip of Chinese Democracy is 475Mb, 15 tracks, 30mb each on average (only a few tracks are below 30mb, actually) - so I'm not that far off the mark (compared to reasonably MP3 where almost every track is below 10mb even at 320kbps it's still huge - three times the size), although it would depend on the type of music, of course.

Using that as a reference though, if you listen to five different, complete albums a month, that's near 2gb, which is pretty much on the verge of most mobile ISPs data caps - hence my point of moderate level MP3 compression being useful for 'non-reference' listening. It's good enough, and doesn't destroy your bandwidth allowance - hence why it's probably the optimal choice.

Even 320kbps is a around half to one third of the size of FLAC - which makes a massive difference when comparing transfer rates and sizes.

I'm surprised Google haven't used their WebM experience to create their own audio-only codec though, which would be Very Google, if you think about it...

Anyway, as I say, you're not wrong, but I stick to my point - I can see why they went with MP3; it makes sense in terms of quality vs bandwidth. If you want lossless quality you can copy it locally. If you want easy, accessible-from-anywhere-access, MP3 is (Alas) the way to go.

Steven R