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?
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 flac is almost the same as uncompressed, I think something is wrong.
If you care anything for quality it’s FLAC, compression ratio will affect the size
Flac for storage, turn up the compression level. Transcode to an appropriate format when copying or streaming to a device
FLAC is supposed to be way smaller: https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/looking-at-flac-compression-ratios/
I use Opus at 192 kbps. It’s overkill but it should be almost perfect and has the size of an MP4.