Flac What is it?

[Sylar666]

I did, and it came back with a link to you, amazingly enough.

is that supposed to be funny ?

HAHAHAHA

It was, dude. Sergeant always means what he says - and he doesn't take no prisoners! You better watch out, bloke!

[Lee1]

Just spark open a few beer sand your good to go !!!!

[colbert]

If all you do is listen to music on your computer or car the typical mp3 will suffice. Flacheads will claim that it is far superior which it is in being close to CD quality, but I'm perfectly happy with a proper v0 mp3 rip.

[Quylui]

If all you do is listen to music on your computer or car the typical mp3 will suffice. Flacheads will claim that it is far superior which it is in being close to CD quality, but I'm perfectly happy with a proper v0 mp3 rip.

Well, I'd like to start off commenting on that statement by appending "depends". For me, my head unit and speakers clarify the difference between a FLAC and MP3 encoded file. However, for some people with a low-output head unit and paper-cone speakers, they might not be able to hear the difference, although there is usually an audible difference through any output.

FLAC is CD quality. A FLAC file is essentially a compressed lossless file, meaning that it should sound as good as the source it was ripped from yet be more efficient in terms of space. I listen to FLAC encoded files on my computer through my headphones, and through my car speakers as well.

Lots of people use FLAC for archiving music. For some, they would rather have the FLACs for future use, but have the MP3s on their portable systems. It's simply a matter of preference.

[vinhkhang01]

You can hardly tell the difference bet. FLAC and MP3 unless you have a high-end amp or speakers.

[Totti]

thx for all the info cleared up allot of questions for me

[adissan]

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.

FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

[killuminati96]

It's nice to find a song in Flac if you basically want a wave rip of the song and don't want to buy the cd. I prefer VBR mp3 over Flac tho. Almost all my mp3's are ripped from my personal cd collection and when I compare the mp3 to the cd it sounds the same. Flac takes up too much hard drive space. It would be like having every single mp3 you have in 320 kbps. That takes up too much space and is the opposite of what mp3 was for. The only problem with mp3 is too many people don't know what they are doing when they make one. There are way too many 128 kbps mp3s out there with hiss/pops/clicks/skips/swishy sounds. It's like 90% of all mp3 makers use MusicMatch Jukebox or that old Audiocatalyst program or something just as lame to make them.

For the sake of my hearing everybody needs to trash crappy programs and constant bitrate encoding and use EAC with Lame v3.9 encoder set to High Quality/New Method/Stereo and so it's around 192-320 variable bitrate (on Audiograbber this is a couple moves back on the slider from highest setting). It will never happen tho. It does seem VBR encoding is getting more popular. It's just a shame not everybody does it.