Audio formats, Converting and Decompressing Audio Files

Just use Opus

512 vbr for archival quality

192 vbr for audible transparency

The only other format to use is WAV if you're into music production or video editing but everything else is a meme.

>this thread
>in 2017

Lossless formats are, as one should deduce, the exact same audio data as on an audio CD.

If you mean original recording as in the unmastered, raw output from in the studio before it reached the sound engineers, then no, you cannot. If by original recording, you mean the release as if you bought it from an official source, then yes, regardless of compression level, the audio will be exactly the same.

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CD quality is "Lossless" (as is anything higher, like "High-Resolution" audio but that's irrelevant for our current discussion as all you really need to worry about is CD quality audio and everything lower for consumer usage.)

Lossless audio formats, like FLAC, ALAC, WAV, etc. should, in theory, be equivalent to CD audio quality and never lose fidelity when converted between each other. You can have compressed lossless files as well (i.e. FLAC compression levels) and you will never lose audio fidelity (you just won't ever be able to get the file size nearly as low as a lossy file, but still.)

WAV shouldn't really ever be used unless you're producing audio and need to work with raw/lossless audio. It's not compressed at all and serves no benefit in listening (not to mention it doesn't really support metadata so you can't properly tag WAV files.)

ALAC is fine, it's what I use for archiving because I use iTunes a lot (thanks iPhone) but my actual listening library is a mirror of my ALAC archive but in 256kbps AAC / iTunes Plus format for size reasons (also 256kbps AAC is transparent, meaning it's not discernible from lossless to the human ear. I only keep the lossless archive if I ever need to convert to a different format [b/c converting from one lossy format to another lossy format is highly degrading to the quality] or if I ever need to alter any songs in a program like Premiere or Audacity, since lossless files are inherently better suited for manipulation because there's literally more information there to work with, hence the much larger file size.)

One more thing, converting a lossy file (i.e. mp3) to an ALAC or FLAC file doesn't magically increase the fidelity, all you're doing here is making a "fake" lossless file (needlessly inflated filesize but the quality is still the same as the original lossy file. When you make a lossy file like an mp3 or AAC file, you literally -lose- information that can't ever be recovered,)

Hope I could help!