Best Audio archive format ?

I'm looking to backup my audio to a lossless format and am considering the following formats:

1) Monkey's Audio (Excellent compression and used to be leader of pack, but lack of development or developer feedback is negative)
2) WavPack (Excellent compression and with constant development seems to be new leader of lossless codecs)
3) FLAC (Excellent support although development is a bit slow - seems to be most peoples archive favourite)

I used to use Monkey's Audio format due to best compression and speed, and it's a shame it's no longer actively developed with little feedback from the original developer. However, WavPack seems to be the new top-dog.

ShouldI use WavPack for my archival purposes, or should I use a different format ?

 

I think Monkey's audio should be rules out mainly because it is slow to archive with, and the gains aren't really worth it considering the time, couple with the limited hardware support.

WavPack does do compression better, but again it is limited in the number of devices it supports, which was the clincher for me.

Therefor, I chose FLAC, since it is lossless, which will save me space, but at the same time all of my devices can play it without alternate firmware, and it is widely developed for the OSs I use as well.

However, the beauty is that since they are all lossless, you can convert back and forth without worrying about anything, so if you initially use WavPack for its better compression and development, but find out that a device of yours doesn't work with it, or that the alternate firmware really kills the battery life of your device, then you can always move over to FLAC.

BTW, I was searching around a little and I found this link which should help you:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

I use WavPack myself, although FLAC has more extensive hardware support. Hardware devices supporting WavPack are starting to appear: Cowon A3

Both are free, open source and multi-platform.
TAK is a new promising codec: