[joshspankit]

Yes exactly. What you’re saying lines up with what I’ve learned through experience.

> If you're looking to preserving as much detail as possible from your masters then floating points make sense.

I’ve been searching for hours and gotten nothing more than the classic floats vs ints handwaving. Can you explain what you know about why using floats preserves detail?

[adastra22]

Do you actually have experience writing a FLAC encoder/decoder? I do. Go read the format specification. There is a lossy compression pass, then it uses a general compressor on the residual after you subtract out the lossy signal. The two combined allow you to reconstruct the original signal losslessly.