I just started using the FLAC format for mixing to see how i liked it and as I researched saw way to many opinions online. So I'd rather keep it in house and ask the people I respect and whose opinions I value. What is your standard settings for exporting mixes to the FLAC format? Yes I have opened myself to ridicule with the respect and value line :)     Thank you

FLAC is my format of choice. MP3 is just for convenience these days. Lossless compression is worth the extra storage space in my opinion.

I also prefer FLAC and set the FLAC converter to 24 bits as I typically record in 24 bits.
I don't use MP3 as I think memory is cheap so why use lossy compression (MP3) when I can use lossless compression (FLAC).

Sonar Flac Wave Null TestYouTube app - 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/mht-gyi9IM4

so, if they're not identical,
it's lossy, eh?

Still better than twilight though.

Wave is not lossy in any form. Everything else is, simple as that. It is dumb to render your final mixes in any other format other than wave. Fine to render into lossy formats after you have rendered down to wave. Always have the high quality backup of the unmastered/mastered mix.  There is no excuse for it. With drive space not being an issue these days I don't see the reason to not render out mixes in the best quality you can. At least to start with.

batsbrew
so, if they're not identical,
it's lossy, eh?

I think it might be 1 bit lossy. The difference goes either all the way up, zero, or all the way down after normalization. To me this means that something is either 1, 0 or -1. Those are the variance. So, using Flac 24 bit seems to lose exactly 1 bit of resolution. For a lot of digital audio, the most significant bit is omitted (assumed to be 1). This is the reason in floating point you have -0 and +0 values because neither can be exactly zero if there is always a presumed 1 at the most significant bit. Normally this gets you one more bit of resolution.
 
I don't know if the 24 bit waves count as floats. I think they don't. I'm not positive though.
 
In any case, the Flac seems to lose exactly 1 bit of resolution as compared to the waves.
 
In this 1 bit, I am able to pick out the song well enough to recognize it. (It sounds awful but you can hear it.)

FLAC itself is lossless. However, some data loss may occur before encoding, e.g. converting from 32-bit floating-point data in your DAW to 16- or 24-bit integer data because FLAC doesn't support floating-point data. This is why, when you encode to FLAC and then decode it back into wave, the two won't null.

You learn something new everyday.