FLAC is the abbreviation for a "Free Lossless Audio Codec", meaning an audio compressing standard without any loss. It is a freely available format implemented by the Xiph.Org Foundation and published in 2001. (source: Wikipedia)
Over the past years FLAC has gained a lot of popularity because it offers compressed audio files with excellent sound quality in a format similar to MP3. FLAC is comparable to Win-Zip or RAR and has a higher data volume as MP3 but works without loss. The format is also applicable for streaming. The FLAC codec encodes and decodes evenly whereas the computational effort for encoding is higher than the one for decoding. That means that FLAC files can be played with relatively low computing power.
FLAC is a free software and can therefore be used with any arbitrary software. That means that there are according players for all popular operating systems. Additionally to the common MP3 files, a lot of musicians offer their music in FLAC format to provide excellent sound.
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