ssamadhi - I was counting tags, seeking, fingerprints & fb2k support in my 'as good as' category since flac is obviously excellent in those departments. I was lazy and didn't make that very clear though.

As for speed, I was thinking in terms of FLAC level 8 vs. Wavpack -h. Wavpack can produce significantly smaller files much faster than FLAC. I would agree that at FLAC level 4, FLAC is pretty fast though. But for that matter, shorten is pretty fast at what it does

As for decompression speed, it appears from the wavpack documentation that the -x switch will produce files that decompress faster in the same manner as FLAC files (albeit at the cost of much slower compression, rendering the two formats a virtual tie). I have not experimented with that switch, however, so maybe I misread that.

Thanks for the link to the hydrogenaudio wiki - very handy.