Introduction: FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec
As you might have guessed from the title of this article, FLAC is an abbreviation of Free Lossless Audio Codec. The first word ("free") should be pretty clear (it's an open-source project), but what is a "lossless audio codec"? Well, the well-known MP3 format is an audio codec. It is used to compress raw audio data. MP3 is a so-called "lossy" codec, meaning that, for example, if you would convert a wav file to an mp3, and then convert the mp3 file back to wav, you won't end up with the same audio data. MP3 reduces the quality of the audio while encoding. On the other hand, FLAC is "lossless". If you would convert a wav file to a flac, and then convert the flac file back to wav, you will end up with exactly the same wav file. Nevertheless, a flac file is a lot smaller than a wav file.
You could see a flac file as some kind of zip file (or, for the linux lovers, a .tar.gz file): if you compress some data with it and extract that data from the archive later on, you will just have your old data back. You won't lose any "quality". However, because FLAC is entirely optimized for audio data, it will compress audio a lot better than winzip or gzip. Also, flac is designed to be played directly. You don't have to extract it, you can just tell your music player to play the flac.
Why use it?
Because FLAC gives you cd-quality playback at a lower filesize than, for example, wav. I am a regular FLAC user and as far as I have been working with it, it regularly features a compression rate of about 0.6, or, in other words, the flac file usually is 40% smaller than the wav file I encoded it from. Also, my favourite media players (MPlayer and xmms2) support it. The latter one even plays gapless!
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