subject: Media Players - Flac Player [print this page] What is FLAC Player? What is FLAC Player?
Free Lossless Audio Codec or FLAC is an audio format akin to MP3 but lossless. This means that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is identical to how ZIP works except that with FLAC you get better audio quality as it is draft especially for audio. You can also play back FLAC files in your favourite player just like you would a MP3 file. As the fastest most widely supported lossless audio codec FLAC stands out. It is also the only one that at once is non- proprietary, has an open source reference implementation and has a well documented format.
Features
1.FLCA is asymmetric in favour of decode speed. Decoding only requires integer arithmetic and is much less compute-intensive than most perceptual codec.
2.The encoding of audio data incurs no loss of information and the decoding audio is a bit for bit identical to what went in the encoder. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing on MD5 signature of the earliest audio data in the file header which can be contrasted against later during decoding in testing.
3.FLAC supports fast sample accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for the playback but it makes FLAC files appropriate for use in editing applications.
4.Due to FLACs framing, stream errors limit the damage to the frame in which the error occurred, typically a small fraction of a second worth of data. Contrasted with some other lossless codec, in which a single error demolishes the remainder of the stream.
How to get FLAC
As mentioned before FLAC is braced by many different operating systems. The first thing that you need to know before you begin download is what operating system you have. Once you have this material you can then proceed to one of the many sites that allow you to access and download this. FLAC is free to download and all the source codes and binaries are freely accessible and administered under Open Source License.
Audio Players
There are many audio players that you can choose from that play FLAC files and that are free. Each has its own strength so it really depends on your personal taste. There is always the option of downloading them all and see which one works to your liking.
Winamp- this is a very favourite audio player that now supports FLAC playback and encoding.
VLC Media Player- this is an open source media player that supports many platforms like Windows, Mac and Linux.
