WavPack pre-dates FLAC by two years, but it reached popularity after FLAC did. There were many codecs that came out right around 2000; Monkey's Audio, LA, OptimFROG; they all compressed really well but were expensive to encode and/or decode. This was a huge drawback with the hardware at the time.
FLAC achieved some popularity early on because it was cheap to encode and decode, and produced acceptable compression ratios. But its mindshare shot up in 2003 when Xiph.Org announced FLAC was joining their banner of codecs as their preferred lossless offering.
Mainstream interest in FLAC resulted in WMA Lossless and ALAC; that's what people were using. But in enthusiast circles, WavPack became an alternative competitor to FLAC, because it had better compression in high (but not normal), it was also open-source (which was rare in those days), and its dev was a participant in compression enthusiast communities.
After the FLAC/Wavpack duopoly, TTA was a good effort from a Russian team but it fizzled because it had no compelling differentiator against codecs with better share. The next big news was TAK, albeit the dev was relentlessly pressured to open-source.
FLAC achieved some popularity early on because it was cheap to encode and decode, and produced acceptable compression ratios. But its mindshare shot up in 2003 when Xiph.Org announced FLAC was joining their banner of codecs as their preferred lossless offering.
Mainstream interest in FLAC resulted in WMA Lossless and ALAC; that's what people were using. But in enthusiast circles, WavPack became an alternative competitor to FLAC, because it had better compression in high (but not normal), it was also open-source (which was rare in those days), and its dev was a participant in compression enthusiast communities.
After the FLAC/Wavpack duopoly, TTA was a good effort from a Russian team but it fizzled because it had no compelling differentiator against codecs with better share. The next big news was TAK, albeit the dev was relentlessly pressured to open-source.