Lossless Music Archives

Example FLAC fingerprint line:
a3b4c5d6... 01 - Song Title.flac

Run regularly: flac --test *.flac to detect corruption. lossless music archives

P2P or private trackers dedicated to lossless (RED, OPS, etc.) are out of scope for a general guide, but exist for out-of-print or rare media. Always respect copyright. Example FLAC fingerprint line: a3b4c5d6

| Service | Lossless Support | Cost | Notes | |---------|----------------|------|-------| | Backblaze B2 | Yes | $0.006/GB/month | Great for cold storage | | AWS S3 Glacier Deep | Yes | $0.00099/GB/month | Retrieval takes hours, fees apply | | Google Drive / OneDrive | Yes (but may throttle) | Subscription | Not archival-grade | Warning: Never rely on streaming services (Apple Music,

Warning: Never rely on streaming services (Apple Music, Spotify) as an archive. You own nothing.

| Format | Best for | Pros | Cons | |--------|----------|------|------| | FLAC | General archiving | Open source, widely supported, good compression, metadata | None significant | | ALAC | Apple ecosystem | Native iTunes/macOS support | Slightly less compression than FLAC | | WAV | Studio / legacy | Raw PCM, universal | No native metadata, huge size | | AIFF | Mac studio | PCM + metadata | Larger than FLAC/ALAC | | Monkey's Audio (APE) | High compression | Better ratio than FLAC | Poor hardware support | | WavPack | Hybrid mode | Lossy + lossless in one file | Niche |

Recommendation: Use FLAC for almost everything. Use ALAC only if you are fully Apple-bound and cannot use FLAC.