

Sure - Wikipedia says it better than I could hope to:
As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.[11]: 25 In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is fewer than vs less than.[11]: 26 A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.[11]: 26
I think the best way to handle this would be to just encode everything and upload all files. If I wanted some amount of history, I’d use some file system with automatic snapshots, like ZFS.
If I wanted to do what you’ve outlined, I would probably use rclone with filtering for the extension types or something along those lines.
If I wanted to do this with Git specifically, though, this is what I would try first:
First, add lossless extensions (
*.flac
,*.wav
) to my repo’s.gitignore
Second, schedule a job on my local machine that:
.mp3
,.ogg
- possibly also with a confirmation that the codec is up to my standards with a call to ffprobe, avprobe, mediainfo, exiftool, or something similar), it encodes the file to your preferred lossy format.git status --porcelain
to if there have been any changes.git add --all && git commit --message "Automatic commit" && git push
Added album: "Satin Panthers - EP" by Hudson Mohawke
orRemoved album: "Brat" by Charli XCX; Added album "Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not" by Charli XCX
Third, schedule a job on my
remote machineserver that runsgit pull
at regular intervals.One issue with this approach is that if you delete a file (as opposed to moving it), the space is not recovered on your local or your server. If space on your server is a concern, you could work around that by running something like the answer here (adjusting the depth to an appropriate amount for your use case):
Another potential issue is that what I described above involves having an intermediary git to push to and pull from, e.g., running on a hosted Git forge, like GitHub, Codeberg, etc… This could result in getting copyright complaints or something along those lines, though.
Alternatively, you could use your server as the git server (or check out forgejo if you want a Git forge as well), but then you can’t use the above trick to prune file history and save space from deleted files (on the server, at least - you could on your local, I think). If you then check out your working copy in a way such that Git can use hard links, you should at least be able to avoid needing to store two copies on your server.
The other thing to check out, if you take this approach, is git lfs.EDIT: Actually, I take that back - you probably don’t want to use Git LFS.