Your rudeness is entirely unnecessary and unworthy of this site. Not everyone knows the details of audio formats. That's OK.

OP – the reason they state this is that FLAC is lossless so offers limited compression but preserves input audio exactly. AAC is a lossy compression format and will discard input audio data that it thinks you don't need – converting it to other formats may produce artifacts. OGG is a container that supports both lossless and lossy internal formats, but I believe it's typically used with a lossy internal format (called Vorbis).

Not GP, but nothing about ML engineer demands knowing nuances of audio file formats for future proofing.

I just downloaded from Bandcamp for the first time. I've heard FLAC is sort of the go-to format for good quality, but when presented with ALAC, WAV, and AIFF which all had larger filesizes, I paused and asked a friend.

It just seemed to me like an odd question to ask into the public domain from someone who's in the technical sector. It's kinda basic that you'd want to take the smallest lossless file alone and perform all the other conversions either on demand or as needed. It's also - at least, to me - relatively 'polite' not to overwhelm a service which is apparently struggling by overloading the shit out of it with redundant downloads.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome and will get you banned here, so please don't do that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Sorry, carried away etc.