FLAC Audio Format gets First Update in 6 Years

[Katzenfreund]

The Free Lossless Audio Codec, FLAC, loved by audiophiles for its lossless fidelity has been updated to version 1.3.0. FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but “lossless”, meaning that audio compressed in FLAC doesn’t suffer any loss in quality. Technically, MP3 is lower quality, since it’s lost data from its original format. FLAC v1.3.0 is the first update in almost 6 years and it is also the first release from the new Xiph.Org maintainer team.

Storing your music in a lossless format has its own advantages. It’s certainly the best digital representation of your music.

FLAC 1.3.0 has improved the handling of cuesheets with non-CD-DA sample rates, it has added support for encoding from and decoding to the RF64 and Sony Wave64 formats. The –sector-align option of FLAC has been deprecated and support has been added 56kHz to 192kHz gain analysis. Better error handling has also been added to this release amongst many other improvements and changes.

The development of the Free Lossless Audio Codec has been moved to the Xiph.org git repository. Details about this release can be found in the official changelog.

https://xiph.org/flac/changelog.html

Though FLAC is the choice of purists, MP3 is far more popular and easy to find, though of lower quality. There also other formats, lossy and lossless.

But which format do you use?

 

[Dr Pickles]

These old ears are pretty darn happy with the so-called lower quality of MP3's (64Kb or better).

 

[Katzenfreund]

I’m basically with you Niman. I usually listen to music at my computer using external, decent but by nature not outstanding speakers. The truth is I can’t tell the difference between MP3 at 128 kBps and anything higher.

Yet, FLAC requires about 5 times the file size and WAV (CD) 10 times!

 

[911dance]

I still use MP3 as my portable media player does not support FLAC.

 

[EMS]

Only point in listening to FLAC files is if you have a dogs bo**ocks sound system or you might as well have Mp3's. And for that reason I listen to Mp3's, its a lot more compressed than FLAC, which means I've got more room