wav is uncompressed PCM usually, flac is compressed and as such smaller (difference in size depending on the kind of music), but they’re both lossless with the resulting signal being bit for bit identical to the data on the CD.
320 kbps MP3 makes little sense nowadays except for when you need maximum quality for a device supporting nothing else. For long term storage, use flac.
There’s no technical reason for 320 CBR but the space loss from a VBR ~224 encode to the CBR 320 is minimal compared to 320 vs flac around 1000. I do keep two copies of my collection for space reasons though - one in flac and one at 320. My phone is still a limiting factor to from a space perspective, I can’t store my entire collection on it in flac but I do choose to use it where I’m actively listening to an album through the weeks. The rest can be mp3 because it’s usually a single song that gets in my head.
I don’t really have MP3-only use cases anymore, but back when I did, it was mostly where transparency was achieved rather easily, like listening to music on the go with… non-perfect headphones, and on those cases, I went with lame’s -V5 IIRC which is closer to 130 kbit/s or so. For higher quality, but not lossless (storage was still expensive back then) I used Musepack. But high bitrate MP3 was almost never needed.
Flac or wav, right? Is flac smaller?
Or go 320kbps mp3…
wav is uncompressed PCM usually, flac is compressed and as such smaller (difference in size depending on the kind of music), but they’re both lossless with the resulting signal being bit for bit identical to the data on the CD.
320 kbps MP3 makes little sense nowadays except for when you need maximum quality for a device supporting nothing else. For long term storage, use flac.
There’s still some use cases for sure. My 4 gig Garmin running watch (2.5 usable) might play flac but I want more than a few albums on it.
Then again why would it need to be at 320 kbit for this kind of use case
There’s no technical reason for 320 CBR but the space loss from a VBR ~224 encode to the CBR 320 is minimal compared to 320 vs flac around 1000. I do keep two copies of my collection for space reasons though - one in flac and one at 320. My phone is still a limiting factor to from a space perspective, I can’t store my entire collection on it in flac but I do choose to use it where I’m actively listening to an album through the weeks. The rest can be mp3 because it’s usually a single song that gets in my head.
I don’t really have MP3-only use cases anymore, but back when I did, it was mostly where transparency was achieved rather easily, like listening to music on the go with… non-perfect headphones, and on those cases, I went with lame’s -V5 IIRC which is closer to 130 kbit/s or so. For higher quality, but not lossless (storage was still expensive back then) I used Musepack. But high bitrate MP3 was almost never needed.
It is my understanding that FLAC is effectively a zipped WAV file. Same audio but with lossless compression.