What is the best format settings to store a physical music?
I did look at Flac but the data is almost the same size as the uncompressed Wav and none of my devices or self hosted services seem designed to play flac files. Everything gets converted.
What are people using?
If flac is almost the same as uncompressed, I think something is wrong.
OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.
Flac for me has been about half the size of wav, at least for normal 16 bit 44 khz audio. Maybe it’s worse at higher bit depth? Anyway bulk storage is pretty cheap. You could have Flac in your archive while keeping ogg or whatever on your everyday playback device.
If you’re storing them for yourself I would recommend doing an online AB test to figure out at what bitrate you are capable of hearing a difference (assuming decent headphones or speakers). For some people anything above 256kbps is wasted (or even 128). If you find yourself in that category you can just use lossy formats and stop worrying about FLAC.
This is good advice right here. Unless you’re a dj (even then it’s overkill) and or have incredibly high end equipment (again, it’s probably overkill), just go with some high bitrate mp3. MP3 is incredibly compact, everything plays it, and has all the metadata needed. Seriously you can’t tell the difference.
