What is FLAC?
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, a leading compression technique that preserves original audio quality while reducing file size. FLAC is an open-source, royalty-free format that has been adopted widely for its many advantages in digital audio reproduction. Compression techniques take large files such as wave (.wav) files and reduce the data bits while preserving as much of the audio landscape as possible. A well-known audio compression format is MP3 (.mp3). MP3 files slim down bulky wave and compact disk (.cda) files to a fraction of their original size, making MP3 an ideal format for portable audio players. The MP3 format allows a vast library of songs to fill a very small storage footprint. However, there is a trade-off in audio quality. FLAC surpasses MP3 quality by preserving the original soundscape in exact detail. The FLAC format reduces the original file size by roughly 30-60% with no loss of quality, hence it is a lossless format. This differs from the MP3 format whic
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, and it is an audio compression format like MP3, but while MP3 uses a “lossy” compression, which basically discard audio information that humans can’t hear, FLAC uses a lossless compression, which will not change the quality of the compressed audio. This means that if you rip an Audio CD track to a FLAC file, that file will retain the same quality of the original (CD quality), like a WAV file, but it will take less space (usually about one third of the corresponding Wav file). An MP3 file wold take a lot less space (about one tenth of the corresponding Wav file) but to get this compression rate MP3 (like other lossy comnpression algorthms, such like Ogg Vorbis or WMA), throws away part of the sound information. Of course lossy compression algorithms try to discard info that an average human can’t hear, but if your hears are sensible and well trained, you will appreciate the high quality of FLAC lossless compression. You find more info about FLA
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file. FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations. See About FLAC for more, or Using FLAC for how to play FLAC files, rip CDs to FLAC, etc.
