FLAC is an audio encoding format. It’s also a very good one for a number of reasons. FLAC is a “lossless” format, meaning none of the data from the source recording is compressed or removed (assuming you use the same bit depth [not the same thing as bit rate] and frequency range). This is inarguably a good thing. Lossless is the word of the year (or last 3) among audiophiles (and those who like to consider themselves audiophiles), but the implications of lossless have been twisted and manipulated in ways that are just not factually supported.
Why is FLAC awesome (and is it awesome)? Really, it is – as much as I hate FLAC listening purists, FLAC has a real place in the digital audio world that should not be overlooked.
You know of one other lossless audio format called .WAV. Yep, that same, good ‘ol format that your Windows system sounds are encoded in (though that’s 8-bit and usually mono). WAV preserves 100% of audio information in 16-bit 44.1KHz stereo format when ripping audio from a CD. FLAC is better than WAV for two reasons. First, it does everything WAV does (lossless audio), but in a much smaller package (WAV is extremely inefficient in its use of space). Second, it allows the use of more tags (including “illegal” tags in Windows) for marking files. That’s it. Otherwise, same juice, different label. WAV does have the advantage of being more editing / DJ-friendly (also less work for the CPU since it’s hardware decoded), but that’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about here.This gets us to why FLAC is awesome. It’s all about preservation and archiving! FLAC uses less space than WAV, and allows more precise tagging, making it ideal as a long-term digital storage medium for audio. No matter how many times you copy it (well, in the relative sense), generation after generation, the source audio remains virtually unaltered. But WAV can be compressed for uploading http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/compress-wav-file.html that is FLAC can not do well as WAV
Why is FLAC awesome (and is it awesome)? Really, it is – as much as I hate FLAC listening purists, FLAC has a real place in the digital audio world that should not be overlooked.
You know of one other lossless audio format called .WAV. Yep, that same, good ‘ol format that your Windows system sounds are encoded in (though that’s 8-bit and usually mono). WAV preserves 100% of audio information in 16-bit 44.1KHz stereo format when ripping audio from a CD. FLAC is better than WAV for two reasons. First, it does everything WAV does (lossless audio), but in a much smaller package (WAV is extremely inefficient in its use of space). Second, it allows the use of more tags (including “illegal” tags in Windows) for marking files. That’s it. Otherwise, same juice, different label. WAV does have the advantage of being more editing / DJ-friendly (also less work for the CPU since it’s hardware decoded), but that’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about here.This gets us to why FLAC is awesome. It’s all about preservation and archiving! FLAC uses less space than WAV, and allows more precise tagging, making it ideal as a long-term digital storage medium for audio. No matter how many times you copy it (well, in the relative sense), generation after generation, the source audio remains virtually unaltered. But WAV can be compressed for uploading http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/compress-wav-file.html that is FLAC can not do well as WAV