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.
quick question, when i looked through the source files of some of the videogames i own most of them store the music as ogg and not mp3, is there a specific benefit of one over the other?
For what? wav is your lossless container. Pretty much universally recognized. Think of it like RAW for photos. ogg is lossy and more appropriate for most use cases, but is not universally recognized and not available on all devices.
*.flac
Wav is more or less “raw” audio. It is typically not compressed.
Ogg Vorbis is a lossy compressed format. It reduces the “quality” of the audio in exchange for a smaller file. More often than not, the change in quality is not perceptible to the human ear.
Other lossy compressed formats include MP3, AAC, and Ogg Opus. There’s plenty of neuance to compare between these lossy formats. But if you don’t already know about them, just assume Ogg Opus is best, Ogg Vorbis and AAC are the same, and MP3 is worse. AFAIK Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, but they may have upgraded to Ogg Opus by now.
FLAC is a losslessly compressed format. It compresses the raw audio without changing the quality at all. All lossless formats are the same quality as Wav. The only differences between the lossless formats are the size of the file and the CPU cost to decompress the data.
Have more questions about codecs? Just ask! I’m not an expert but I do know a decent bit about this stuff.
None, FLAC is
wav
