The technical strengths of FLAC compared to other lossless formats lie in its ability to be streamed and decoded quickly, independent of compression level.

For example, an MP3 file created using the setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file about 1/11 the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. Lossy compression is designed to reduce significantly the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to 50-60% of its original size and decompress to an identical copy of the original audio data.

It is a common audio format for consumer audio streaming or storage and a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on most digital audio players.įLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio and is also the name of the reference codec implementation. MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is an audio coding format for digital audio that uses lossy data compression.

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