> If you deeply care about music and are an audiophile you do
FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content.
FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content.
You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better.
FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).
So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%.
Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that.
The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3.
So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap.
The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.
It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller.
Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones.
A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.
I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.
> FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content
Yes it does. It’s anywhere from 70-30% the size depending on genre. That’s a benefit.
> you might think that FLAC/lossless is audibly better.
No I think and expect it to sound audibly identical. That’s the whole point.