Anyone who works with audio either as a hobby or as a professional knows about MP3 and WAV, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Namely:

* MP3 (most commonly MPEG III)
	+ disadvantage: lossy compression
	+ - [compression artifacts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact) manifest
	+ - subject to [generation loss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_loss)
	+ disadvantage: [patent issues](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues)
	+ advantage: relatively small file size
	+ advantage: [ID3 metadata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3) tagging
* WAV (Waveform Audio File Format)
	+ disadvantage: audio data not compressed
	+ - relatively large file size
	+ disadvantage: 4 GiB (232 - 1) file size limit
	+ advantage: crystal clear† quality

Being an audio "producer", I know to use WAV for everything. However, I'm in a dilemma. As stated above, WAV files are *large*. A 4 minute stereo song is about 50 megabytes. All those songs add up. In addition, WAV files don't support metadata like MP3 does as far as I've seen.

I can always compress the files with 7-zip's "ultra" option, but this isn't reasonable (or feasible) for files I'm currently working with.

What I'm looking for is an audio format that has the "crystal clear" quality that WAV has with the metadata ability and small file sizes of MP3. Essentially, an audio format that has losslessly compression and metadata. I would prefer it to be widely supported. Maybe just an MP3 codec that is *lossless*? Does anything like this *exist*?

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† audio quality depends on export or rip quality and speakers