I have been working on a reponse to the issues raised by wazoo. I wanted my response to be methodical and well thought out. But I was running short on time so instead I am offering my thoughts on the issues raised in no particular order:

The fact is that wavpack DOES offer reasonably significant increases in compression over FLAC at comparable compression speeds. It is BANDWIDTH that I am concerned about since this site is dedicated to bittorrenting. I'm not concerned about archiving since you can archive in any format you want. But if an archive format offers better compression and same robustness as FLAC where is the downside? There isn't one. In addition, many people are starting to use wavpack as their archive format-of-choice. I see no reason why they should be compelled to transcode to FLAC before torrenting their files here.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'adding it to the mix'. I think, once again, you are confusing the issue of transcoding archives with permitting torrents to be offerred in wavpack format. TTD already permits APE format and yet it clearly hasn't become a dominant format. There is nothing about APE that makes it a clear winner over FLAC or WV, but it's permitted here. Logically, Wavpack should be permitted here as well since it is every bit as robust as APE.

We are both agreed that allowing wavpack here wouldn't require anyone to transcode all of their existing shns and flacs to wavpacks. It's all a matter of a logical progression: For a time we all downloaded and archived SHNs. Now we have basically switched to FLAC and to a lesser extent APE. We download and we archive them. But we still keep our archived SHNs. If we all switch to WV, we would keep our archived SHNs and FLACs. If wavpack were to be allowed at TTD it has absolutely ZERO effect on existing SHN and FLAC archives.

But I think the fundamental flaw in your argument, wazoo, is that OS compatibility, portables and hardware support are not nearly as significant as people think. For one thing there is no way of predicting what OSs, portables or hardware will reign in the future. It's pure speculation at this point to think that FLAC will be the 'flavor of the year' 5 years from now. SHN was the flavor 5 years ago but it's now technologically obsolete. The same thing can easily happen to FLAC and wavpack 5 years from now. I think it's a waste of time and energy to worry about what will be 'the' format of the future because odds are you will guess wrong. And it doesn't matter anyway, for a number of reasons:

• Lossless formats are easily converted/transcoded into each other (notice that I make no distinction between the two terms). If some future format takes over you can convert your WV or FLAC files to that format when the time comes.
• Afaik FLAC support has only appeared on one portable, the Rio Karma, and that support was recently discontinued. There just isn't much demand for lossless codecs on portables. MP3 still reigns in the portable market, in spite of the advent of superior lossy formats such as vorbis, aac and musepack. FLAC's future as the portable format of choice is far too speculative to require TTD to put all its support behind FLAC in the hopes that portables will adopt this format. TTD isn't in the business of supporting portables anyway. Furthermore, TTD allows SHN and APE. It makes no sense to allow those formats while banning WV if TTD were in the business of promoting lossless portable formats, which it is not.
• OS support doesn't matter. Wvpack's source code is publicly available. If you switch to a new OS in the future you can compile a binary and voila your wv files are up and running. In addition it will be a simple matter for programmers of successors to FB2k to program a plugin to deal with WV on future OSs. No lossless format has a lead in this area provided its source code is publicly available. Wavpack's source code is, so that's not an issue.
• In the long run hardware support (which includes portables) isn't that significant anyway. The most likely future scenario is that all devices will be computer based, i.e. they will be computers running an OS such as Linux, Windows, etc. For the reasons I gave above regarding OS support, you will easily be able to play today's formats on those future devices. Slavery to format will be a thing of the past.

I am all for encouraging development. But I do not think that picking one format and 'sticking with it' encourages development. I think you are confusing 'development' with hardware support. On the contrary I feel the best way to encourage development is to foster competition among the various lossless codecs, by being prepared to move to a different format that offers advantages over existing ones.

I can see no principled reason why Wavpack is not an acceptable format at TTD, other than the current lack of shntool support. SHN, FLAC and APE are all permitted here, and none of these formats are clearly superior to WV. I would be perfectly happy to email the developer of shntool to point out to him that an upgrade is required, so that we can adopt wavpack here without any reservations.