whats with the flac format?

[Karr Lord of Chaos]

ive recently noticed a new format called flac. it seems to be a new way to compress music without losing any of the quality.

is there really a noticeable difference between mp3 and flac formats? it seems to be extremely space consuming, being 8x the size of a regular mp3 or so. im wondering if the extra storage space is worth it.

whats your experience with it?

[Translucid]

Re: whats with the flac format?

well, it's pretty much used so that you can take the files and compress them to mp3 or whatever file you want, so that you have the highest quality for whatever you need. just convert them with LAME and delete the originals I say.

[Alex]

Re: whats with the flac format?

The average listener can't tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and 256kpbs MP3. The Audiophile scoffs at 256 MP3s and any digital audio container that's not FLAC or OGG.

Forget about it. If FLAC was any value to you, you would have tracked it down or even heard of it before now.

[Chrono]

Re: whats with the flac format?

It also depends greatly on your sound system. So yeah, don't worry about it.

[H2SO4]

Re: whats with the flac format?

FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec, is just a file format that compresses an audio file without losing any of the information in the uncompressed audio file. The result is a smaller file for storage or streaming but the same quality in the compressed audio file. Like the above posters said, unless you have really acute and picky hearing the difference is so slight it's nearly impossible to detect, so the whole thing is more novel than actually useful for the average listener.

[The Dark Jester]

Re: whats with the flac format?

Flacs great but the files are too chubby and I need as much HDD space as I can get.