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There are a number of reasons: * Most FLAC tools support metadata. For the more "bare" formats that's not the case. When converting to a lossy format, I want m

There are a number of reasons: * Most FLAC tools support metadata. For the more "bare" formats that's not the case. When converting to a lossy format, I want my metadata intact. * FLAC can be played directly on most media players (with metadata). * The format may be complicated, but the source is open and actively maintained, and there's support everywhere. Using FLAC in your software project is a breeze. * 2x compression is nothing to sneeze at. My archival collection takes up 1TB on my mirrored, backed up NAS. I like that better than it taking up 2TB (which would be 1/6 of my space). Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore.

corysama 5y ago
> Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore. And, there it is. Thank you.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  You missed the other points. This one point is the weakest of them all. FLAC is simply better supported for the things people care about. JPEG2000, for example, never caught on because nobody cares enough about the storage savings, and there were no other compelling features that anyone cared about. But for audio, we want our metadata. Had WAV been built with strong metadata support, FLAC wouldn't have gotten very far. But that ship has sailed.
mindslight 5y ago
> Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore. I'm halfway there, 1TB collection on a 30TB array. When I repurpose a previously used drive, I've got a bad habit of making a multi-TB image in case I forgot to copy anything off, and then forgetting about it. (I'm in the middle of writing some tools to sort through those.) Still, what would be the advantage to moving to WAV? There is zero experience-overhead to FLAC. This isn't like some proprietary crapware format that becomes hit or miss due to patents or poor licensing. It's a Free format so common players all seamlessly support it. We're talking like 300kB of binary code, in a world where stuffing 300MB CRUD apps at users is normal. If I want to transcode to MP3 for some bespoke device, then the FLAC compression makes that process quicker via saved IO bandwidth. There's literally no end-user complexity that I would save by moving to WAV. And if I wanted to develop software to read an audio file, then I'd import the FLAC library just as how one would generally import a WAV library. OP might as well advocate for storing audio as textual numbers line by line, so it could be easily processed with awk.

corysama 5y ago

> Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore. And, there it is. Thank you.

kstenerud 5y ago
You missed the other points. This one point is the weakest of them all. FLAC is simply better supported for the things people care about. JPEG2000, for example, never caught on because nobody cares enough about the storage savings, and there were no other compelling features that anyone cared about. But for audio, we want our metadata. Had WAV been built with strong metadata support, FLAC wouldn't have gotten very far. But that ship has sailed.

mindslight 5y ago

> Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore. I'm halfway there, 1TB collection on a 30TB array. When I repurpose a previously used drive, I've got a bad habit of making a multi-TB image in case I forgot to copy anything off, and then forgetting about it. (I'm in the middle of writing some tools to sort through those.) Still, what would be the advantage to moving to WAV? There is zero experience-overhead to FLAC. This isn't like some proprietary crapware format that becomes hit or miss due to patents or poor licensing. It's a Free format so common players all seamlessly support it. We're talking like 300kB of binary code, in a world where stuffing 300MB CRUD apps at users is normal. If I want to transcode to MP3 for some bespoke device, then the FLAC compression makes that process quicker via saved IO bandwidth. There's literally no end-user complexity that I would save by moving to WAV. And if I wanted to develop software to read an audio file, then I'd import the FLAC library just as how one would generally import a WAV library. OP might as well advocate for storing audio as textual numbers line by line, so it could be easily processed with awk.