[imrehg]

I'm always uncertain what formats to use if I were to download my digital library from Bandcamp. It seems like at least FLAC, OGG, AAC versions of everything would be pretty mandatory, given how different music players' support is, plus the for archiving. During the day I need to switch between MacOS, Linux, Android, and that's an ethernal technical sudoku...

Any other versions one should take themselves (say one of the MP3 variants), that have any tangible benefits?

[kibibu]

If you grab at least the FLAC you can do any other conversions yourself later

[wilsonnb3]

I usually download the FLAC just because space is cheap but I would be fine with just 320kbps MP3, I can’t tell a difference between them and MP3 is basically universal.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

The perfect solution is to take the FLAC version.

I know that I shouldn’t do this but I download the FLAC version and compress it to Opus 192kbps. It’s very high quality with the size of an MP3. I won’t be able to change the format and recompress it later, but I don’t really mind.

[jMyles]

...FLAC seems like the winner for your requirements, no?

[imrehg]

I'd like to avoid having to convert it all the time (e.g. MacOS' music player doesn't seem to support that? But gonna have to check it). And the sizes are just enormous.

But yeah, as storage space & bandwidth are less and less an issue, if FLAC is fully supported across the board, the scale should be tipped. My worry comes from we not quite being there yet.

[dang]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome and will get you banned here, so please don't do that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[DavidPeiffer]

Not GP, but nothing about ML engineer demands knowing nuances of audio file formats for future proofing.

I just downloaded from Bandcamp for the first time. I've heard FLAC is sort of the go-to format for good quality, but when presented with ALAC, WAV, and AIFF which all had larger filesizes, I paused and asked a friend.

[phlakaton]

Your rudeness is entirely unnecessary and unworthy of this site. Not everyone knows the details of audio formats. That's OK.

OP – the reason they state this is that FLAC is lossless so offers limited compression but preserves input audio exactly. AAC is a lossy compression format and will discard input audio data that it thinks you don't need – converting it to other formats may produce artifacts. OGG is a container that supports both lossless and lossy internal formats, but I believe it's typically used with a lossy internal format (called Vorbis).