Free Lossless Audio Codec??

kog · Post by **kog** » Sun Apr 22, 2007 6:13 pm

Has anyone heard of this audio format (also called FLAC)? A recording friend of mine sent me this item today:

"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."

Not sure where this item came from. I did a search of the forum for both "FLAC" and "Free Lossless Audio Codec" and found nothing.

relayer · Post by **relayer** » Sun Apr 22, 2007 10:28 pm

Yup, it's been around for a few years now. It's basically the next step from SHN (Shorten), which was the standard for a few years. I believe the advantage of FLAC was that it'd compress the files a bit more than SHN would. It's the gold standard in, among other places I'm sure, bootleg trading given that there is no loss of data as you stated.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

kog · Post by **kog** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 10:28 am

Thanks for that information. Had no idea it has been around for awhile.