FLAC is limited to 24 bit depth. I was thinking of intermediate format suitable for use in DAWs and samplers that also supports floating point to avoid clipping.
24-bit integer and 32-bit float have the same dynamic range available, so you are not losing any fidelity.
However, frankly, if you're working professionally with audio like that, the best solution is simply to have sufficient disk space available to work with raw audio.
Use FLAC to compress the final product, when you are done.
They have the same precision but float has vastly larger dynamic range due to the 8-bit exponent. When normalized and quantized for output this does result in roughly the same effective dynamic range (depending on how much of the integer range was originally used).
The issue is audio is typically mixed close to maximum so any processing steps can easily lead to clipping. One solution is to use float or larger integers internally during each processing step and normalize/convert back to 24-bit integer to write to disk. Another (better imo) option would be to do all intermediate steps and disk saves in a floating point format and only normalize/quantize for output once.
I haven't worked with professional audio in over 25 years (before everything went fully digital) but I would be surprised if floating point formats were not an option for encoding and intermediate workflows. Many quantization steps seems like a bad idea.
> I would be surprised if floating point formats were not an option for encoding and intermediate workflows.
For bouncing tracks to disk, uncompressed 32-bit floating point formats are avaliable, but I am not aware of any fast losslessly compressed 32-bit floating point format.
All professional audio production software these days internally works with 32/64 bit floats. That's the native format, because it allows you to go above 0 dBFS (maximum level), as long as you go back below it at the end of the chain.
EDIT: Floating point is useful while you are working to avoid any accidental clipping. As an intermediate format, like a ProRes for video. FLAC is great as a final format.
Projects with 100+ tracks are not uncommon. Sampler/rompler of a single virtual instrument can play 10+ sounds simultaneously. Playback of an orchestral score with virtual instruments can easily go over 250 simultaneous sounds, so just a real-time playback (without any additional processing) would already be a challenge.
No, actually only first few dozen KB of each sample are usually preloaded into RAM. The rest is streamed from a SSD. One library of an orchestral section can have 100+ GB of samples. You wouldn't fit all sections in 128GB of RAM.
However, frankly, if you're working professionally with audio like that, the best solution is simply to have sufficient disk space available to work with raw audio.
Use FLAC to compress the final product, when you are done.