FLAC 1.3.4
How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC?<p>By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM.  With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in.  But, is that really worth the bother?<p>I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out completely. FLAC on the other hand has had decades of work put into it. It is an engineering marvel.  I just wish people would think simpler than “engineering marvel” when it comes to archival formats when the simplest conceivable format works just about as well… :$<p>Edit: Many people are bringing up MP3/Ogg/Opus, compressing podcasts, how silly it would be to toss out <i>all</i> forms of audio compression.<p>To be clear, MP3/Ogg/Opus make perfect sense to me. They are complicated. But, in return you get 8-12x the content at great (not perfect) quality.  FLAC on the other hand
Is at least as complicated, has a lot less widespread support and has an ROI of 1.5-2x…<p>As a consumer, I can see that 2x in return for a modest amount of hassle can be an OK deal in constrained situations -like price-gouged mobile storage. As an engineer who has maintained software systems over many years, the complexity of FLAC compared to trivial PCM as an archive format makes me a sad, cranky, old greybeard.