Lossless format: FLAC
What is FLAC
In the 20th century, we choose between the media and the media to play music. Cassettes, vinyl, CD – each multimedia format had its own player, each had its own advantages and disadvantages. In the 21st century, the approach has changed significantly. Playback tools have become omnivorous and you have to choose not the multimedia format, but the format of the audio file.
At a time when digital music had not yet penetrated the computer in the way it is now, the choice for connoisseurs of high-quality sound was quite simple and straightforward. Most used CDs, while those who could afford to buy more expensive equipment and discs opted for SACD or DVD-Audio players, or universal models that play all optical audio disc formats. Now you can get high-quality audio content without buying discs, in which case the whole choice comes down to the format for storing your music.
Today there are several dozen formats (codecs) that are used to represent audio files. Among them, no more than a dozen can be called an undercarriage. Lossy audio compression is most often done using the MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer3) codec; less frequently, the WMA format, which is a proprietary Microsoft development, is used for this purpose; AAC, developed by Apple or available under the GPL-free Ogg Vorbis format. We will not dwell on the topic of compressed audio in detail, we will limit ourselves to a brief description.
The MP3 format and its aforementioned analogues allow you to compress CD-quality music material into smaller files (the compression ratio ranges from 2: 1 to 11: 1). As the developers envisioned, compression algorithms should process the audio stream in such a way that the sound of the compressed file does not differ from the original. In fact, you can hear the difference between the sound of a compressed file and an uncompressed original, and the higher the quality class of the equipment, the more obvious these differences become. There is no difficulty in attaching a CD to MP3 or getting ready-to-use MP3 files from the Internet or on physical media.
The only specificity of compression files is their ability to embed protection against copying or unauthorized reproduction (DRM). One of the main initiators and distributors of the technology to protect audio files was Apple, which, however, soon put forward a proposal to abandon such solutions and urged all manufacturers of music products to distribute it without protection. Since 2009, music sold on the iTunes Store has no such protection. The vast majority of compressed content sold over the Internet and on physical media is also not protected against unauthorized reproduction.
There are several different formats to store digital music without losing quality. The lossless and uncompressed audio stream is saved to a WAV or AIFF file. In this case, the file type is determined by the type of operating system on which the audio stream is saved. The WAV format is a joint development of Microsoft and IBM, and AIFF is the brainchild of Apple. There are also proprietary lossless audio compression formats: Microsoft’s WMA Loseless (also called WMA9) and Apple’s ALAC. Of these, only the second has become widespread due to the fact that it is almost the only way to listen to high-quality audio from iOS devices.
Another option for storing uncompressed audio content is disc images, which are a single file with the ISO extension, which is an unmodified copy of the content on a digital medium.
The most widely used lossless music compression format is the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format. As its name implies, this format is distributed under the terms of a free license, which means that to ensure its support on any audio device, it is not necessary to pay royalties. FLAC allows you to store audio tracks with up to eight channels and a bit depth of up to 32 bits and a virtually unlimited sample rate, allowing it to be used to store any content, including multi-channel HD soundtracks. The popularity of FLAC as a high-quality audio compression codec is as great as the popularity of MP3 among compression audio formats. The vast majority of high-quality music is stored and distributed in the FLAC format.
