could be played from many audio player, not so important for us, but a good feature in case beekeeper want to listen to the recordings and check the recordings also
asymmetric codec: encoding is more expensive than decoding
As a flac alternative I see only one popular thing, which also can be used by GStreamer: wavpack.
Besisde everything else needed here, they have a unique (?) hybrid mode:
The hybrid mode provides all the advantages of lossless compression with an additional bonus. Instead of creating a single file, this mode creates both a relatively small, high-quality lossy file that can be used all by itself, and a “correction” file that (when combined with the lossy file) provides full lossless restoration. For some users this means never having to choose between lossless and lossy compression!