Audio Basis - articles about audio
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) (.flac extension) is PCM audio format. It provides lossless data compression. Also, FLAC is a container file for music stuff.
"Lossless" means "original and compressed audio contents are binary identical completely".
Read how to open FLAC files, convert, playback, what sound quality.
To store continuous albums, a single big *.flac file may be used with CUE index file, that point to each track's beginings.
Free Lossless Audio Codec is supported by Xiph.Org Foundation.
Open-source programming library of the codec is available under Windows, Unix family (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, Amiga.
Also, FLAC codec has hardware implementations.
One of the infinite discussions is "Sound quality FLAC vs. WAV". There is an opinion that WAV sounds better than FLAC.
Even FLAC uncompressed was released.
FLAC and WAV have identical binary musical content. Thus, FLAC sound is absolutely identical to WAV.
In the video, we can see, how to compare FLAC and WAV musical content. Main question: how FLAC and WAV can sound differently when both ones contain absolutely identical digital stream? It's a software "bug"?
There is a hypothesys that FLAC decoding increases CPU calculating intensity. And, more intensive electromagnetic radiation with wire noise impact to analog part of DAC more significantly. It increases noise level at the analog output. However, for modern computers, FLAC decompression is not too big load.
The author doesn't see researches, where noise levels are compared for playback FLAC and WAV with similar binary audio content.
Upsampled FLAC has losses, technically. But playback distortions may depend on the sample rate.
See more audio players...
FLAC file is iTunes incompatible. However, FLAC can be converted to AIFF with keeping metadata (including artwork).
As example, if you use FLAC file converter AuI ConverteR, into its Settings > Metadata > check Compatibility metatags with iTunes switch.
FLAC is a lossless format. MP3 is lossy.
MP3 may have different levels of compression. It is not obligatorily, that you distinguish the sound difference between FLAC and MP3.
If you don't hear the difference now, simply keep original lossless FLACs, WAVs or other. Maybe in other equipment, you get the sound difference. Or new compressing format appears to achieve lesser size with keeping quality, as example.
Both FLAC and WAV are lossless audio formats.
The main FLAC advantages are:
In instance, sometimes audio players don't display song name, performer, genre and others that are embedded into WAV files.
However, WAV supports sampling rates above 384 kHz and bit depths in float point format and above 32 bit.
Read discussion about sound quality here...
FLAC audio sample download:
FLAC is a lossless audio format. So, it is one of the formats that provide the best sound quality.
Read more...
mp3 is a lossy sound file format. FLAC is a lossless one. Technically, FLAC is better.
Read more...
FLAC and WAV provide lossless sound quality. They are identical in the first approach.
Read more...
Read what is the best cue splitter...
Read the guide on how you can split FLAC file with CUE splitter...
You can split big audio file with .cue sheet file according to this guide...
You can extract audio data from big sound file by .cue file according to the manual...
You can convert CUE files with audio file to mp3 according to the guide...
To convert mp3 to DSD read this manual...
You can trim FLAC files on Mac via an audio editor like Audacity or other.
December 16, 2022 updated | since June 24, 2017
