When or ifever I end up buying music, it’s going to be physical where possible because legal download sites are going on delisting sprees now, eg. like 7Digital’s been doing for a while now.

At least with physical CDs, I can do my own FLAC rips and not worry about losing the physical copy unlike with legal download sites where if it’s delisted, it’s completely gone even for downloads you already bought.

Vinyl also technically can be ripped to FLAC, but since you’re digitizing an analog format, it’s a real-time process so you gotta sit through an entire side of an LP unlike with CDs which can be ripped quickly, plus you’d need to manually split the raw waveform up into individual tracks, and manually input metadata, digitizing analog formats like vinyl, open-reel, or cassette is a very long, drawn-out, and manual process vs. ripping CDs, but it’s something I’d still recommend doing especially as vinyl physically wears down every time it’s played back as is its nature being a mechanical format read by a stylus, so digitizing an album to FLAC for future playback and then putting the physical album back on the shelf can prolong its life, especially for any particularly valuable albums.

This goes for tape formats too although since they’re read by a magnet, they don’t wear down every time they’re played back in the same way vinyl does, but they still degrade.

Another perk to all this especially for digitizing vinyl in particular, is you’d have a FLAC ‘master file’ you could then transcode to Opus or some other lossy codec for listening on space-limited devices like a lot of lower-end mobile devices, but that also applies to FLAC rips of CDs or even digitized tape albums too; keep the FLACs at home while putting the Opus rips on your phone if your phone is space-limited (even 510kbit/s Opus rips are smaller than the FLAC input file while having no audible degradation).