Originally Posted By: Mike Halloran
Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
Mike, you're more on top of these things than I am: what standard would you recommend for lossless downloadable audio files from PG Music that would serve both Mac and Windows?


Good question but I think the correct answer is It doesn't matter.

BIAB for Mac and Win use different schemes that are incompatible with each other and there's no universal standard that's compatible with both (FLAC is not supported by the MacOS). Zip and RAR do not save space and must be decoded so neither is a solution for the End User. In any case, there will always be two versions to download.
.....

I think Matt's question was inadvertently slightly loaded here, which also slightly loads the answer.
There is, or can be, a difference between "lossless audio format" and "lossless download" that skews both the question and the answer a bit.

Mike's absolutely right that there's no compression advantage by applying, e.g., .zip to an already losslessly compressed format, but there is a compression advantage of applying it to, e.g., a .wav file.

There isn't I think any real reason why .wav files shouldn't be compressed with, e.g., .zip for the download and decompressed onto the drive after download, to be used thereafter as the .wav files.

That's different, of course, from BIAB directly using a lossless format like FLAC for the file format on the drive.

I presume(!) that "(FLAC is not supported by the MacOS" means supported natively and that there's no fundamental reason why PGM shouldn't use the algorithm/library themselves, notwithstanding that Musocity suggests that there are other better-suited lossless format(s) around.

Last edited by Gordon Scott; 06/07/23 11:34 PM.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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