Sorry wfaulk, the point of this thread is concerned about the convenience of having the raw ingredients to hand before encoding. You say that you can use a FLAC file regenerate the original WAV file exactly. But that would be adding an extra 2 steps. I.e. to make an MP3 at some later date the abridged rites of passage of a mp3 files would be ripp, encoded to flac, regenerate to WAV, encode to mp3 (instead of just ripp & encode to mp3). It's simply not worth going to through all that hassle/time just for potentially halving the WAV file size, anyway I would have to a hard drive large enough to convert my FLAC files back to WAV so that I can encode them in the manner which I stated, so that brings me back to square one. So while it's an interesting proposition, the aggravation, time taken, and plain inconvenience really does rule it out as a practical solution.