You can care about quality to the extent that a lossy codec allows. Lossless is not always necessary or wanted. This is like saying “why care about transcoding quality when you can keep the video as is?”. There’s a myriad of use cases and preferences at play here.
[−]cosmic_cheese · 2026-07-01 Wed 18:17 UTC ·
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There are a ton of older, but still perfectly usable devices that support AAC well but not Opus.
(1) Lossy codecs are transparent at half the file size (or less) of FLAC/ALAC.
(2) AAC (strictly, AAC-LC) is universal, where FLAC and Opus are not yet there.