I mean, you're again assuming the only use case is "encode and tag a huge music collection", encoding is used for more than that. For example, I have a raspber

I mean, you're again assuming the only use case is "encode and tag a huge music collection", encoding is used for more than that. For example, I have a raspberry pi that is responsible for recording as soon as it powers up. Then I can press a button, and it grabs the last 60 recorded minutes, which happens to be saved as .wav right now, which I'm fine with, the rest of my pipeline works with .wav. But if my pipeline required flac, I would need to turn the wav into flac on the raspberry pi at this point, for 60 minutes of audio, and of course I'd like that to be faster if possible, so I can start editing it right away.