As I understand the technologies, WAV is a raw, uncompressed format and FLAC is a compressed but lossless format.
My research has shown that FLAC files "still maintain all the audio fidelity"src of WAV.
I'm just wondering: Could I be saving a significant amount of disk space by converting all of my WAV originals to FLAC? Or would I lose audio data that might be important in the future if I want to (re)process my recordings?
FLAC is fully lossless and can reproduce a sample-accurate waveform. It's awesome.
The main reason not to encode everything as FLAC is simple convenience. For many applications (using them in most DAWs, for example) you'll have to transcode them back to .WAV which takes some time. Not much, but some. Whether this matters or not is entirely up to your workflow.
Save for bugs in your encoder software (if there are any), you will not lose any audio data going back and forth between FLAC compression and raw WAV.
You won't lose any data. In fact, FLAC has much better meta-data support so you actually gain data if, after converting, you tag the FLAC files with meta-data like author, BPM, song title, etc.
The only reason I can think of not to save things as FLAC is compatibility. Not all software will understand a FLAC file (example: iTunes, Logic) but I've never met software that couldn't handle WAV files. You'll definitely save on space at no cost to quality but you may find yourself converting from FLAC back to WAV to work with the files. If that takes time, the question becomes what's worth more? Your time or your disk space?
I don't understand why ths wasn't mentioned earlier, but even without looking whether or not software supports the FLAC format, there is a general reason why you don't want to use it.
Flac saves you about 60% of the space and gives you spiffing tag info, but at a price I am not going to pay at any moment in my recording-workflow: it costs CPU power to decode them. This is highly inconvenient when you are working on a project, especially when you need your CPU to do DSP-related things. If you would convert a FLAC file back to WAV (disk access time not counting) you get a general idea of CPU time this process takes during the playback of the entire track.
It is a very beautiful format to keep your personal music in, but in the recording/production scene, I will gladly donate my plenty disk space in exchange for my invaluable CPU time.
One (specialized) reason: FLAC doesn't support 32-bit floating point audio. To losslessly compress that, you have to use a less-widely-supported format such as wavpack.
I'm struggling with this issue now, as well. The one downside to Flac, that I can see, is that it doesn't support media cues.
One benefit to recording in Wav is that I can record a lot of audio at one time -- say, an hour -- and then Go back and mark where different things happen in the recording.
There are DJ programs that will add 'hotcues' to sections of audio, and you could probably create a cue sheet as well. But if you mark a section of audio as bad, and decide to delete it, any cues behind that section will stay with the audio. If you cue up a flac file and then edit it, all the cues after the edit will be out of sync.
FLAC is takes some decoding algorythms to read, it is an actualy codec.
WAV audio is simply time vs amplitude, it's alot easier for audio applications to read, games, DAWs, Players.
FLAC isn't established enough so that it is a standard recording or playback format. perhaps it will become more popular when compression is not necessary due to increased disk sizes.
So the disadvantages are compression time and lack of support for FLAC.
There should be industry support for flac from all recording programs.
Uncompressed WAV or AIFF will sound better than FLAC for a very simple reason. FLAC requires your processors to decompress and this produces more electrical noise in your system. The only way to avoid this is to properly isolate the DAC stage from the analogue output, something only a few brands like PS Audio does.
Check this video out for better information:
