Lossless Audio Part 2
FLAC Overview
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec – Free lossless audio compression. That is, the audio is compressed in FLAC without losing any information. This compression is similar to Zip , but FLAC will give you a higher compression ratio, because FLAC is a compression method specially designed for the characteristics of audio, and you can use the player to play the compressed FLAC file like you normally play MP3 files like
FLAC system support
FLAC is free and is supported by most operating systems, including Windows, “unix” (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. And FLAC provides a build system in autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder development tools.
FLAC project content
The format of the data stream is provided in the form of a FLAC Reference Encoder and Decoder Library, a command line program that can encode and decode FLAC files Metadata editor for Input plugins for different audio players
FLAC Features:
Lossless Compression: The encoded (PCM) audio data is lossless and the decoded output audio is the same in every byte of the encoder input. Each data frame has a 16-bit CRC check code of the current frame, which is used to check for data transmission errors. For all audio data, an MD5 tag for the original uncompressed audio data is also stored in the file header
Fast: FLAC places more value on decoding speed. Decoding requires only integer operations and has low computational speed requirements relative to most encoding methods. Real-time decoding can be easily achieved on very common hardware.
Hardware support: Since FLAC provides a free decoding paradigm and decoding complexity is low, FLAC is currently the only hardware supported lossless compression. which has hardware support.
Streamable: Each FLAC data frame contains all the information needed for decoding. The current frame is decoded without reference to the data frame that precedes or follows it. FLAC uses sync and CRC codes (similar to encoding formats like MPEG) so that the decoder can have minimal time delays when locating jumps in the data stream.
Positionable: FLAC supports fast sampling and precise positioning. This is not only beneficial for playback, but also makes FLAC files easier to edit.
