The FLAC format is an audio file format whose name is the acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec and has been developed by the Xiph.org Foundation.
This audio format
compresses the files to decrease their size without losing quality
. An important point of the FLAC format is that it is free, open source and royalty-free.
All the features mentioned above are those that have made FLAC a very widespread format that has gained a place in the market and today we find a multitude of portable players or media players that support this format.
At the same time, we find more and more FLAC extension files on P2P file sharing websites, communities and there are even artists who choose to market their music in this format.
Quite often we find a new file format or a file extension that we did not know, this forces us to keep our knowledge updated and this is what we intend in this article where we will explain what the FLAC format is and its characteristics.
What is the FLAC format?
We can easily define the FLAC format as a lossless audio format that allows us to compress our music.
To fully understand this definition we must understand some concepts such as bitrate, loss and lossless compression, concepts that we will explain below.
What is bitrate?
When we talk about bitrate we refer to the amount of bits that are processed in a unit of time
, in the audio formats Kilobits per second (Kbps) are generally used. The higher the bit rates per second, the more space the file will need to be stored, but it has the advantage that it will retain better quality so that we will achieve a more faithful result to the original.
Bitrate is a very important aspect in the MP3 audio format, since the final quality of the music depends on it.
With bitrates above 192 Kbps you can usually get a really good audio quality and more than enough to store our music on portable devices.
The disadvantage of the MP3 format is that it is a compression format with losses even if we use high bitrates, so we will never get the original sound and this is where the importance of FLAC comes in.
Differences between FLAC and MP3, which format is better?
Before answering the previous question, we must explain what the loss and lossless compression consists of. Using audio compression formats such as MP3 produces a loss of quality, which is what is called a
lossy
format. On the opposite side we have the lossless formats, which are called as
loseless
formats and this is where we fit the FLAC format.
Having the above concepts clear, we cannot say that one format is better than the other, but it will depend on what we are looking for and we must choose one format or another depending on our needs.
When to use the FLAC format and when to use the MP3 format?
FLAC is a format that is not focused on portability, but on the conservation of music.
This is because it maintains the original audio and its size is larger than that of an MP3. If your intention is to store and keep your music albums in digital format, the FLAC format is the best option.
MP3 files offer enough quality to play music on portable devices, while maintaining a small file size, these features make it a perfect format to take our favorite songs to the beach or gym and listen to them from a smartphone or Portable player.
Something to keep in mind, is that we should not convert MP3 to another format with losses (ACC, OGG, WMA, etc ...) since in each conversion the quality will be reduced more and more. On the other hand, if we have the FLAC files, it will be like having an original copy of the audio, so we can convert FLAC to MP3 or other format while maintaining high quality.
It is also true that to perceive the difference in quality between a high quality MP3 file (320 Kbps) and a FLAC file, a prodigious ear is needed or to use computer tools. We could say that most human ears will not be able to find quality differences.
Characteristics of the FLAC format?
In addition to all the features already exposed, this format offers us:
-
Support to add album covers.
-
Support to add metadata (album name, artist, genre, ect).
-
It is a format with great support from the community and that we can play on almost any operating system or hardware device, including portable players, Raspberry Pi (Kodi), media players, etc.
-
It is a multiplatform format and we find free and free tools that allow us to convert our music to FLAC and even convert from FLAC to MP3 or other formats.
-
FLAC files usually have the extension
.FLAC
, although we can find them with the extension
.FLA
.
Although there are
alternatives to FLAC
with similar characteristics such as
Monkey's Audio
(extension
.APE
) or
WavPack
(extension
.WV
), if we are realistic, FLAC is the most widespread.
So far this article where I hope to have achieved the objective of explaining what the FLAC format is and that it has been helpful.
