What is FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

Summary

FLAC means Free Lossless Audio Codec. As its name implies, this file format is an audio coding format that compresses the audio file to around half of its original size. It can produce exactly the same quality as the identical copy of the original source when decompressed. Because of this reason, those who want to save a copy of the original CD tend to choose FLAC to preserve the sound over other lossy audio formats. This is meant to prevent the original source from being damaged or lost.

Initially, FLAC was introduced in place of other lossless audio formats such as ALAC, WAV and WMA Lossless. By comparison with these file formats, FLAC has its own advantages and is compatible with lots of music players. For example, as opposed to WAV in large file size, FLAC offers premium quality with half the size and supports metadata tagging and album cover art and so forth. Normally, you can rip an CD to get FLAC files which can be converted to other lossy formats like MP3 and AAC for some specific purposes.

Main Features

• Lossless compression. The audio data would be lossless when being encoded (see how to convert lossless FLAC), which makes audio with FLAC format remaining its original sounds.
• Fast speed in decoding.
• Hardware supported. FLAC is the only widely hardware supported lossless audio codec since 2012.
• Available in stream media.
• Positioning supported.
• Suitable for archives applications. Since FLAC is an open and lossless audio codec, it can be converted into any required format. When it encodes, FLAC will compare with the original data and send notice if the data were different when checking.
• Flexible metadata. It can be defined and improved with no effect on the use of data stream and encoder.
• Convenience for copying data from DVD. There is a cue form on the FLAC, which stores all the contents and soundtracks in a single file. Whenever your CD damaged, another duplicated audio can be copied from the backup file.
• Anti-damage: Thanks to its frame structure, the loss could be controlled within damaged frames when the data stream was corrupted.

Visit our: How to Convert FLAC to Apple Losselss on a Mac

Difference between MP3 and FLAC

Both MP3 and FLAC are an open format without DRM. MP3 is a lossy music format. That is to say, MP3 audio files are greatly compressed in order to reduce the file size to save more space. In contrast, FLAC is an lossless file format and six times as large as MP3 in file size. However, FLAC is 50 percent the size of CD and still distributes excellent sound quality. Frankly speaking, MP3 will not be replaced by FLAC, but if the sound quality is your top priority, then FLAC is the best bet.

How to play FLAC

The problem with FLAC is the inability to be supported by iOS devices natively. However, there are a few apps in the App Store that allow you to support FLAC audio format such as FLAC Player and Capriccio. For Android users, this is less of a problem since FLAC can be supported from Android 3.1 and up. For windows platform, there are many useful players like Windows Media Player and JRiver. For Mac to include FLAC files for playback, downloading Fluke will be fine.