What's FLAC?

FLAC is an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC is the highest quality format for digital audio. It's playable on any computer operating system and can be streamed through the internet. You can store thousands of hours of FLAC audio to a single flash drive smaller than your thumb.

 

Highest Quality Audio

Since FLAC is a lossless scheme, it is suitable as an archive format for owners of CDs and other media who wish to preserve their audio collections. If the original media are lost, damaged, or worn out, a FLAC copy of the audio tracks ensures that an exact duplicate of the original data can be recovered at any time. An exact restoration from a lossy copy of the same data is impossible. 

 

 

MP3 Files Are Not FLAC

The MP3 is a great format for digital audio because of it's compression. It's possible to store an hour of 128 kbps audio using less than 60 megabytes (MB) of data storage. However, the FLAC format has no compression, requires more storage space, but is highly suitable for transcoding without the normally associated quality loss between formats.

 

 

FLAC Resiliency

The FLAC digital audio file is extremely resilient and moves across the world at the speed of light. As digital data, it can be copied and stored in multiple locations, further increasing it's life expectancy to what one might consider indelible. Thanks to FLAC, there's now a worldwide digitizing boom and race to save old audio stuck on aging physical media like reels, cassettes, and even old CDs.

Written by Geoff Weber

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