Rick Steve's audio guide or guided tour of the Louvre

No offense to the host of this site, but I would always choose a live guided tour over an audio tour if the option was available. I don't know that you need to stagger the times but others may have opinions on that. Make sure you only buy from the official Louvre website, which currently has this warning:

IMPORTANT INFORMATION Watch out for ticket fraud!

Watch out for ticket fraud: stay vigilant when buying your tickets
for the Musée du Louvre. Beware of the current increase in mirror
sites. Do not purchase any tickets that supposedly allow you to jump
the queue, and never buy your tickets from illicit street vendors. If
you do, you may be refused entry to the museum.

A guided tour by a docent of the museum is always the way to go. We've been on 3 soon to be 4 RS tours, and we've had museum tour guides from the museums on every tour.

Clearly, there's a need for audio tours, but they aren't the equivalent of a guided tour.

A live guided tour, imo, is always better. We recently completed the Best of Germany tour visiting Dachau. The tour is now using audio guides instead of a live guide, very disappointing and I stated as much in my tour review. We had a live guide when we did the the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp on the GAS tour and in my opinion there was no comparison. I would only use the Rick Steve audio tour if you didn’t have another option.

Hands down take the guided tour! A real person can answer questions and probably will give more information in total (spoken word count) than the audio tour.

In addition I wanted to point out something you can do before your trip to learn more about the Louvre. The Great Courses has a video course "Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre" with 12 30-minute lectures. See https://shop.thegreatcourses.com/museum-masterpieces-the-louvre Many libraries offer free streaming access to Great Courses videos thru apps such as Kanopy so it may be worth checking to see if you have access.

I will offer a different perspective- we used the Rick Steves audio guide on a visit to the Louvre in 2022 and really enjoyed it. This was not our first visit but as the Louvre is gigantic it took us to quite a few things we hadn't seen before. The advantage you have with an audio guide is you can pause it if you want to spend more time on something or if something between stops catches your eye, etc. The downside as others have mentioned is you can't ask questions. It depends on what you want.

We used the RS Audioguide at the Louvre a few years back, and it was fine. We weren’t sure where to start in such a big museum and it guided us through many of the most famous works, and it was easy to follow. But if you’re booking a timed entry anyway, you might as well also book the live docent tour along with it, if they offer a highlights/overview tour.
If cost is a factor (not sure if the docent led tours cost extra), the RS app is free, and like I said above, it was a good intro to the highlights.

Yes, time your entry to be well before the tour time. You will need to check-in at the window in the group tour area, get your headphones and will be given instructions about where your group should wait for the tour to begin.

Interesting question, dare I add another thought - I would want to do some research ahead of time about what I wanted to see in such a gigantic museum. (I've been a few times.) Pam from the Forum recommended 'Adventures at the Louvre, How to fall in love with world's greatest museum' by the former NYT Paris bureau chief. Reading it for just 10 minutes at a time might enhance your trip, provided you enjoy that kind of research! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213395444-adventures-in-the-louvre

Interestingly, on our upcoming Rick Steve's Paris and the Heart of France tour, we are given admission to the Louvre but expected to use the Rick Steve's audio guide to tour it. We did not encounter that on the Best of Italy or Best of Spain tours.