EDIT: I'm thinking about a format that would be suitable as a replacement for uncompressed WAV files in DAWs. Rendered tracks often have large sections of silence and uncompressed WAVs have always seemed wasteful to me.
Using the command line "flac" tool, "flac -0" is the fastest, "flac -8" is the slowest, but produces the smallest files.
In my experience, 0-2 all produce roughly equivalent sized files, as do 4-8.
My application is to send audio (podcast recordings) to a remote audio engineer friend who will do the post processing, then round trip it to me to complete the editing.
Wav is so big it makes a 1 hr podcast a difficult proposition.
MP3 is unsuitable because compression introduces too many artefacts the quality suffers unacceptably.
What do other people do in this circumstances?
However, frankly, if you're working professionally with audio like that, the best solution is simply to have sufficient disk space available to work with raw audio.
Use FLAC to compress the final product, when you are done.
EDIT: Floating point is useful while you are working to avoid any accidental clipping. As an intermediate format, like a ProRes for video. FLAC is great as a final format.
The issue is audio is typically mixed close to maximum so any processing steps can easily lead to clipping. One solution is to use float or larger integers internally during each processing step and normalize/convert back to 24-bit integer to write to disk. Another (better imo) option would be to do all intermediate steps and disk saves in a floating point format and only normalize/quantize for output once.
I haven't worked with professional audio in over 25 years (before everything went fully digital) but I would be surprised if floating point formats were not an option for encoding and intermediate workflows. Many quantization steps seems like a bad idea.
For bouncing tracks to disk, uncompressed 32-bit floating point formats are avaliable, but I am not aware of any fast losslessly compressed 32-bit floating point format.
Part of why I built my current machine with 64GB of ram
ZStandard is a very good compressor, with an especially fast decompressor. Maybe someone should try using this instead of zlib in an audio format (FLAC, WavPack, ...)
FLAC is extremely good at compression audio, has very fast encode and uber fast decode. It also doesn't use zlib...
(but seriously, MODs can encode hours of audio into kilobytes, the downside is of course that they require a special authoring process which seems to be a bit of a lost art today)