Edit: Check the replies to my post for corrections and clarifications.
I’ll answer your question and more.
Lossless quality: The highest quality you can practically get, where it’s as close to a 1:1 recreation from the studio as reasonably possible.
Lossy quality: The audio is compressed in a manner where you get the majority of the sound, but slight, fine details are lost to lighten up on file size. Heavy compression can greatly alter overall sound quality, but it’s not the early 2000s anymore, we don’t need to compress music that hard to get an album or two to fit on a 128 mb card.
.wav: Lossless, uncompressed file. Full quality, full file size.
.flac: Lossless quality, but with some compression, to minmax file size to audio quality.
.mp3: Lossy compressed. Small file size with reduced audio quality.
.ogg: Lossy compressed. Basically just an alternative to the .mp3 standard.
Your answer is correct but I am going to needlessly nitpick: Actually, OGG is just the name of the container format. The audio stream inside a .ogg file is usually using a format called Vorbis. However, .flac files also use an OGG container afaik, they just have different file format convention. Same goes for the newer Opus audio format which usually uses .opus despite also being packaged in an OGG container. In any case, it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to name a FLAC or Opus file .ogg.
Side note: Opus is the future but sadly not yet widely compatible outside browsers. FLAC is great and more widely established but also has its support deficits. MP3 and WAV are still the most widely compatible formats sadly.
Ogg is a lossy formar, Wav is not. They are not compatible.
The question should be “Flac or Wav?” And the answer is Flac, unless you need some kind of old compatibility.
what does lossy mean and why flac
Edit: Check the replies to my post for corrections and clarifications.
I’ll answer your question and more.
Lossless quality: The highest quality you can practically get, where it’s as close to a 1:1 recreation from the studio as reasonably possible.
Lossy quality: The audio is compressed in a manner where you get the majority of the sound, but slight, fine details are lost to lighten up on file size. Heavy compression can greatly alter overall sound quality, but it’s not the early 2000s anymore, we don’t need to compress music that hard to get an album or two to fit on a 128 mb card.
.wav: Lossless, uncompressed file. Full quality, full file size.
.flac: Lossless quality, but with some compression, to minmax file size to audio quality.
.mp3: Lossy compressed. Small file size with reduced audio quality.
.ogg: Lossy compressed. Basically just an alternative to the .mp3 standard.
Your answer is correct but I am going to needlessly nitpick: Actually, OGG is just the name of the container format. The audio stream inside a
.oggfile is usually using a format called Vorbis. However,.flacfiles also use an OGG container afaik, they just have different file format convention. Same goes for the newer Opus audio format which usually uses.opusdespite also being packaged in an OGG container. In any case, it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to name a FLAC or Opus file.ogg.Side note: Opus is the future but sadly not yet widely compatible outside browsers. FLAC is great and more widely established but also has its support deficits. MP3 and WAV are still the most widely compatible formats sadly.