In my last post I talked about PNG, the newer lossless image format which I personally think is superior to JPG. Today I wanted to talk about FLAC which is a lossless audio format.
As a general rule, lossless formats do not compress as well as lossy formats. So whereas FLAC will be smaller than the raw WAV file, it will not be as small as an MP3 or OGG. From what I've seen a good rule of thumb is a FLAC file will be about 50% the size of the original WAV. Compare that to MP3 and OGG which will be about 10% the original size. Or another way of looking at it is FLAC will be about 5 times larger than an MP3 / OGG.
If you read my last post, you know I liked the PNG format because you could see the lost image quality even in JPGs saved at 100%. So for me to recommend FLAC over MP3 / OGG there has to be a noticeable difference in audio quality. Unfortunately I cannot "show" you the difference as I can with images, you'll just have to download audio samples and have a listen. That said, I personally couldn't really tell a difference between FLAC and MP3 / OGG. I suspect that it really comes down to A) what the source material is and B) how good your speakers are. The same would be true of images. Most images you cannot see the "noise" in the JPG when saved at 100%. But certain images, such as my sample image with text, the issues with quality were apparent. So I'm guessing the same is true of audio files. Some audio samples you'll have to try very hard to hear a difference, whereas other audio samples the difference will be apparent. Given this, and the fact that MP3 / OGG are noticeably smaller than FLAC, my preference is to stick with MP3 / OGG for most applications.
Even through FLAC didn't win for me, it's still a nice format to have around. There are instances where I will use it, and since it's a totally free codec you don't have to worry about legal issues. One final note I'll mention for all you people out there who listen to your music on Apple devices. Apple has their own proprietary audio format called Apple Lossless. Both formats are lossless, but FLAC is definitely better. FLAC encodes and decodes the music in less than half the time, and the end file is a few percentage points smaller than Apple.
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