best format for what?

.Ogg is certainly better than .mp3; and .flac is almost certainly better than .wav. But as for .ogg being better than .flac or vice versa, that depends on what it's being used for.

.Ogg has no silent prefix segment so ogg tracks can be looped easier than .mp3. .Ogg is also not tied up by intellectual property problems, so more game engines tend to be compatible with .ogg vs .mp3. Some people say .ogg sounds better, too, but I think the difference is neglegible in that area... or can be attributed to differences in bitrate, etc. which are adjustable options on both formats.

.Ogg is not better than .wav for pure sound fidelity. It is still a lossy format, so editing .ogg tracks is kind of like editing .jpg files. The more you change and overwrite the same file, the more weird artifacts you will see/hear, which is why .wav files are preferred for editing and development; they can be edited without loss of quality or adding artifacts. However, .wav's are HUGE, so they are rarely used in the "final product" and a game engine is going to be able to deal with .ogg or mp3 a lot easier than .wav files.

.flac is lossless like wav, but compressed. It also is compatible with a lot of audio editing software. .flac is generally better compressed (and decompresses faster) than, say, a .wav file stored inside a .zip archive. For that reason, .flac is kind of a better "final product" format than .wav is, but there aren't a lot of engines that can play .flac files directly (yet). It's also still pretty large filesize compared to .ogg or mp3. Personally, I don't feel the inhanced audio quality of .flac is enough to make up for being five times larger than the same track in .ogg format. Doubly so for .wav. However, it makes an excellent developement/editing format because it's lossless like .wav, but usually about 40% smaller filesize than a zipped .wav.

TL;DR: IMHO compose with .flac, but ship your game with .ogg.

If you can't do that, compose with .wav, but ship your game with .mp3

I, too, am curious to hear other's opinions on this. I am a developer, not a composer, so I lack the trained ear that may be catching some other unnamed benefits of these (and other) formats.

EDIT: .wav is to .bmp as .ogg is to .jpg, and .flac is to .png

Your explanation is very accurate comprehensive.

Here is a little bit of info of files used by audio engineers in music production.

In Music production .Wav and .Aiff are used almost exlusively. Usually at 24bit. sample rates are sometimes higher as well. Producing at higher bit rates is considered beneficial. higher sample rates are considered to be undetectable by the human ear acording to most audio engineers.

When the music is finished being mixed and mastered it gets reduced to a 16 bit wav or aiff file which is CD quality. the file is stored on the CD slightly compressed in a Lossless manner. Isn't it interesting that some years ago CDs where the standard of music quality and they where often listened to on stere systems. and in modern times most people listen to hevaly compressed MP3s on their inverior cellphone speakers. Apart from Wav itself It is the Flac file that has brought CD quality bak to us.