Dateiliste

FLAC files are lossless compressed copies of wave files. That about tells it - you can save gigabytes of hard drive space by using FLAC files in a mix. But there's another important advantage to FLAC files - as they're smaller, there's a lot less that has to be read in from the hard drive. There's little CPU overhead for FLAC decoding, so if your mixing app can handle FLAC, the FLAC files are to be used. The smaller size of FLAC files means during live mix playback, at least twice as many tracks can be played as with wave files.

The only downside to FLAC is that it's usually 24-bit integer, not 32-bit float. This does cut  out a bit of "air", and definition, but as 24-bit is vastly superior to 16-bit, and most mixing is done in 32-bit float, there's more point to using 24-bit FLAC files than trying to save HD space with 16-bit waves.

A shareware DAW (digital audio workstation) with uncrippled functionality is REAPER. It supports FLAC (and .ogg) for import/export and mixing.