A lot of people choose lossless compression for archival purposes, whilst keeping a seperate lossy file for regular listening.Thomas wrote:Looking over at list az_bont posted, I was thinking, why would you want a hybrid lossly file?
With a hybrid file, you get a lossy file to listen to normally, and another file that is quite a bit smaller than your typical losslessly-compressed audio file to archive. If you ever want to recover the original lossless audio file, you combine the two.
This way, storage requirements for your archived file are smaller, because it doesn't contain all of the information required to reconstruct a lossless file.