FLAC

FLAC is an open and free Lossless compressed audio format. Unlike lossy audio formats like MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC, there is no loss of quality when saving audio files in the FLAC format.

FLAC is the recommended Lossless audio format to use on The Mixing Bowl

FLAC Homepage

• http://flac.sourceforge.net/

Download

• http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html
• http://www.rarewares.org/lossless.php#flac-bundle

Playback

Software

The following media players will playback FLAC files:

• Beep Media Player
• foobar2000
• VLC
• X Multimedia System
• Winamp

Hardware

• FLAC's device list
• Xiph's device list

Encoding

It's possible to encode a WAV to FLAC in Winamp and in Foobar2000. In Foobar2000 just right click -> Convert -> Convert to Same Directory -> FLAC, level 5, all the other settings off -> OK.

FLAC level 5 is the default setting and is the best setting to use for speed of encoding compared to filesize & bitrate. Level 8 will compress slightly more, but the difference between the two is minimal.

You can easily do this with the FLAC frontend and the FLACDrop frontend