Brickfrog

The WD sales are decent if you’re buying new so if you’re feeling like it’s time for a purchase this might be worth it for you.

I did the same earlier this year though in my case I tend to buy the current gen large capacity WD Reds & stick with them for a few years at least. When their 24 TB / 26 TB drives went on sale they actually were cheaper than what Newegg / Amazon had done with their own sales up to then so for me it was worth it.

The other thing to keep in mind, if you’re in the U.S., the whole tariff situation isn’t going to make this stuff any cheaper in the future.

Not automatic (I think) and a bit clunky but the Strawberry music player does have a transcode feature so you could select music files and transcode them a certain way output to another folder. It’s not something I ever do but I did a quick test to a USB drive and it seems to work okay. It’s an option if you opt to use a gui to click through.

PS - Strawberry does have a panel where it lists “Devices” and maybe your phone could show up there and the transcoding would work a bit more automatically, wasn’t able to test that here.

To be fair Ubuntu is still okay especially starting out, it’s one of the more polished distros with a ton of online documentation when you need to search around and figure out how to do things. And no one says you have to stay with a distro, once you’re comfortable with Linux it’s easy enough to check out other distros.

That aside a lot of people have been recommending Mint for new users so that’s definitely one you can check out if you want to try branching out now rather than later.

PS - Nvidia has a less than stellar reputation for their Linux drivers, you may want to consider reading up on that for whichever distro you choose. I have an Nvidia GPU (old non-Quadro class) running on Debian, works fine now but I did have a few false starts getting it going properly at first.