Um, .wav is a lossless format. It's just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it's stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.

Yeah, but that argument was compelling in 2005.

With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn't matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.

And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.

So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.

In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.

FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.

Yeah, this isn’t how that works.

“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.

You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.

Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.

Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd

WAV and FLAC are both lossless, the reason people use FLAC is because WAV doesn't (or didn't) have good support for tags and FLAC has lossless file compression while WAV usually is uncompressed. There isn't any sort of "upscaling" that is done.

Personally, I think a quality v0 or 320kb/s MP3 is perfectly fine for listening but I'm always going to prefer storing lossless audio so I can convert the files to whatever format I want/need. I've moved around between MP3, AAC, and Opus for different devices and if I didn't have the FLAC files I would either have to redownload files or do lossy to lossy transcodes

The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.

I would disagree with this. It isn't really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.

What I've noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.

I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.

Jokes on you, I have thousands of dollars in listening equipment

I totally agree, I was just perpetuating the meme

The .wav part of your comment makes no sense, that is a lossless format, and it is used everywhere because it is dead simple to impliment

Sometimes it's more about knowing you have the highest quality format than being able to hear the difference. An mp3 of a great sounding album with good dynamic range will always sound better than a FLAC of a shitty recording.

I think most people can train themselves to hear mp3 compression even on low quality gear by listening to comparisons of cymbal sounds. An experiment to prove this is to import a lossless track in to a DAW, export it to mp3, import the mp3 and invert the waveform, so playing back you will only hear the differences between the two tracks, ie only the sounds that the compression failed to accurately replicate, the compression artifacts. What you will be hearing with an mp3-320 is a sort of muddy static sound whenever the cymbals hit, blended with whatever other vocals or instruments overlapped with that frequency. This doesn't mean that when you only hear the mp3 it will automatically sound bad or noticeably worse, but it proves there is an audible difference in the character of certain sounds that can be heard even on bad gear.

Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.