Steve Posted October 15, 2005 Share Posted October 15, 2005 FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Unlike MP3, MPC, Ogg Vorbis and other lossy codecs it allows you to compress WAV files with no loss in sound quality. It doesn't offer as high a compression ratio as the lossy codecs, but it will shrink files by around 45-55%. It's useful if you make music on your PC and you want to archive the tracks. FLAC is available for several operating systems including Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris and even Amiga. You can download it HERE. The setup file is only half a megabyte. I'm not sure about the others, but the Windows version also includes a plug-in for Winamp to enable you to play the files and one for Nero so you can burn audio CDs. It also alows you to decode as well as encode. The special version of foobar2000 will play FLAC files too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monophonic Posted October 17, 2005 Share Posted October 17, 2005 (edited) i just gave it a trial. i converted an aiff to flac and to mp3 - the flac is 15% bigger than my average 128kbps itunes converted mp3. i´ll use it to send multitracks. btw its working well for my mac.. Edited October 17, 2005 by monophonic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted October 17, 2005 Author Share Posted October 17, 2005 No audio information is removed from the original file at all, so yeah it's totally lossless. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monophonic Posted October 17, 2005 Share Posted October 17, 2005 i´d love to have an integration in itunes!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted October 17, 2005 Author Share Posted October 17, 2005 the flac is 15% bigger than my average 128kbps itunes converted mp3.The FLAC file should be several times the size of the MP3 at that bit rate. I encoded a 3½ minute WAV and the resulting FLAC file is 19MB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monophonic Posted October 17, 2005 Share Posted October 17, 2005 (edited) hm, thats strange. i converted an aif with 8mb, the mp3 with 128 kbps is 753kb and the flac is 892kb. so the flac is just 892/753 = 18,45% bigger Edited October 17, 2005 by monophonic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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