FLAC Audio File Format Description:

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is a file format for lossless audio data compression. "Lossless" means that FLAC does not remove information from the audio stream, like lossy compression formats such as MP3, AAC, and Vorbis do. FLAC's primary author is Josh Coalson.

FLAC reduces bandwidth and storage requirements without sacrificing the integrity of the audio source. A digital audio recording (such as a CD track) encoded to FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced in size by 40 to 50 percent (46% according to their own comparison).

FLAC is suitable for everyday audio playback and archival, with support for tagging, cover art and fast seeking. FLAC's free and open source royalty-free nature makes it well-supported by many software applications, but FLAC playback support in portable audio devices and dedicated audio systems is limited at this time.

FLAC is specifically designed for efficient packing of audio data, unlike general lossless algorithms such as ZIP and gzip. While ZIP may compress a CD-quality audio file by 10 - 20%, FLAC achieves compression rates of 30 - 50% for most music, with significantly greater compression for voice recordings.

Lossy codecs can achieve ratios of 80% or more by discarding data from the original stream. FLAC uses linear prediction to convert the audio samples to a series of small, uncorrelated numbers (known as the residual), which are stored efficiently using Golomb-Rice coding. It also uses run-length encoding for blocks of identical samples, such as silent passages. The technical strengths of FLAC compared to other lossless codecs lie in its ability to be streamed and in a fast decode time, which is independent of compression level.

As a lossless scheme, FLAC is also a popular archive format for owners of CDs and other media who wish to preserve their audio collections. If the original media is lost, damaged, or worn out, a FLAC copy of the audio tracks ensures that an exact duplicate of the original data can be recovered at any time. An exact restoration from a lossy archive (e.g., MP3) of the same data is impossible. A CUE file can optionally be created when ripping a CD. If a CD is read and ripped perfectly to FLAC files, the CUE file allows later burning of an audio CD that is identical in audio data to the original CD, including track order, pregaps, and CD-Text. However, additional data present on some audio CDs such as lyrics and CD+G graphics are beyond the scope of a CUE file and most ripping software, so that data will not be archived.

Audio Transcoder supports the following conversions with FLAC format files:

• FLAC to AAC
• FLAC to M4A
• FLAC to M4B
• FLAC to MP4

• FLAC to MP2
• FLAC to MP3
• FLAC to MPC
• FLAC to OGG
• FLAC to WAV
• FLAC to WMA
• FLAC to APE

• FLAC to SPX

• AAC to FLAC
• AC3 to FLAC
• AIFF to FLAC
• APE to FLAC
• M4A to FLAC
• MP+ to FLAC
• MP1 to FLAC
• MP2 to FLAC
• MP3 to FLAC
• MP4 to FLAC
• MPC to FLAC
• MPP to FLAC
• OFR to FLAC
• OFS to FLAC
• OGG to FLAC
• SPX to FLAC
• TTA to FLAC
• WAV to FLAC
• WMA to FLAC
• WV to FLAC

Note that Audio Transcoder is not only a great Audio Converter. It is all-in-one solution to convert any audio files - WAV, WMA, OGG,MP3,MP4, AAC and many others, rip Audio CD's, edit metadata (audio tags) .