Originally Posted by
garym
Benefits of FLAC. And I use *only* FLAC:
1. The checksum that is embedded automatically upon ripping with dbpa allows one to confirm in a simple batch process whether any FLAC files have been corrupted. There are many ways to do this, but for example, one can run dbpa BATCH CONVERTER, and select your top folder containing all your files, then choose [TEST CONVERSION] as your codec. This will then automatically decode each FLAC file, create a checksum and compare that checksum to the original audio check sum (tags don't matter here). If they match, all is good. If they don't match, the program will end (FINISH) by reporting the file that has a problem. You can't do this with WAV files, at least not automatically. I do this occassionally on my 130,000 FLAC files, when I create a new backup drive holding the files. Point and click, and come back in a few hours and I then feel confident that no corruption exists on my new backup file.
2. WAV files have no standardized tagging approach. Some players/servers can recognize tags written to WAV files and some can't.
For me, I don't care about file size, as storage is cheap. But I do care a lot about item 1 above. What if I had a disk full of files, and some are showing up corrupted because of bad sectors on the drive, etc. Without the checksum, I'd have to play 130,000 files manually to figure out which ones might be corrupted. With FLAC, I can point and click and have my answer easily. Tagging and the fact that virtually all players/servers handle FLAC files correctly is also a very good thing. And as you understand, these are all lossles files and upon decoding and playback are bit-identical. Don't go down the rabbit hole of "WAV files sound better". The arguments for that had virtually no support in the old days when computers and music servers weren't as powerful. But there's no computer or server in the last 15 to 20 years that would have any problem with the trivial computer task of decoding a FLAC file for playback.