I'm also curious if there will be any perceivable differences in audio quality or performance, with the use of FLAC files.
I did some tests years ago on various compression formats.
Compressing WAVs to FLACs and then decompressing the FLACs back to a new WAVs resulted in the new WAVs binary identical to the original WAVs.
Some people claim that some codecs don't work properly, but I've not personally knowingly seen that.