Selfhosted

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.

Flac 44.1 16bit level 3. Host with something that meets your needs. I have my files in jellyfin and navidrome and can then access the library remotely either through jellyfin web client, navidrome web client, substreamer, Finamp, kodi, etc. but this way if another amazing format comes up down the line I will always have my library in a good state to transcode from. Tag and sort everything with beets.io (or musicbrainz picard is great, I just like that beets is cli). This results in a library I can access on my phone, laptop, tv, carplay, etc

Technically you could go for 24bit but imo the extra file size isn’t justified. though one could make that argument for flac vs 320cbr mp3, transcoding 320 mp3 is more likely to create artifacts, thus the reason for keeping around flac

Alac may be easier for you if you use mac

I use FLAC for long-term storage, 256kbps Ogg when transcoding for mobile devices.

Opus is the best lossy codec in terms of efficiency, but many devices/apps don't properly support it.

If you're storing them for yourself I would recommend doing an online AB test to figure out at what bitrate you are capable of hearing a difference (assuming decent headphones or speakers). For some people anything above 256kbps is wasted (or even 128). If you find yourself in that category you can just use lossy formats and stop worrying about FLAC.

That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you're less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can't, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won't notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you'll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.

Which compression level are you using? My old server is able to compress flac’s at the highest (and therefore “slowest”) compression level at >50x speed, so bumping the level up shouldn’t be too hard on your CPU.

Sheet music.

I'm transcoding everything to 320kbps MP3s. It's much much smaller than flac, and I can't hear the difference even if I try.

Since FLAC tend to be around 1444kbps I use 144kbps opus and that makes them abour 10% of the size.

I save everything in mp3 128kbps. I compared the quality with higher quality and with my setup (Bose speakers & in ear headphones) and with my ears, I can't hear a difference. Opus is more efficient but my source is already in mp3 and I don't gain anything by converting it. If I had to convert from flac, I'd choose opus. 1 4k movie is so big, the size of music doesn't really matter at all.

If I had infinite storage, for archival I’d preferably use FLAC at its default level 5 compression. But like you and others, I thought the file sizes were quite big for a sizeable collection. So my personal compromise was AAC at 256kbps encoded with Apple’s QAAC. It’s small in size, vastly superior to MP3, and almost as universally compatible as MP3. There’s a reason why iTunes has stuck with it for so long, it’s an incredible encoder. I would never be able to hear a difference compared to lossless, at least on my equipment. So I went with it.