What are flac files good for

One area you may have considered upgrading is the audio files themselves. Is this a genuinely worthwhile upgrade, or are we being sold a bill of goods? Audio purists are drawn to FLAC because it leaves the recording untouched. Additionally, FLAC supports a range of bit depths and sampling rates that go high enough to satisfy all your hi-res desires.

Actually, no. Time to get down to it and learn how to get the most out of those FLAC files, and when and where it actually makes sense. Another consideration, particularly if you spend a lot of time listening on headphones outside of your home is background noise.

When loud external noises e. Brilliant job, evolution, but not the best for enjoying music. How does this translate to degrading sound quality? Those gas station earbuds you picked up last week? Keeping the points we already raised in mind, your best option is going to be a pair of wired over-ears , preferably of the open-back variety read more about the differences between these and closed-back designs or a good pair of wired in-ear monitor style headphones.

Forget about the afternoon latte, save money and go get yourself that amazing sound system! If you ever decide to convert your MP3 to any other format, more data will be lost.

Consequently, more data will be lost with every following conversion. However, this is not the case with FLAC files. When converted to WMA lossless or even to lossy MP3, no quality is lost and it can be done numerous times if needed. After all those conversions and copying, the file will stay the same, the quality will be just like in the beginning.

Nowadays MP3 can be played literally on every single device on earth. This is a great thing about it, its popularity has led to us not even doubting whether we will be able to play it on our new phone. With FLAC the situation is slightly different. Even though it is becoming more and more popular day by day, it is still not so common to see on a default music player installed on a smartphone, which can play FLAC files. It is not a very big deal though — there is a number of excellent music and media players, such as VOX music player for Mac and iPhone , which can play other lossless formats as well.

More and more music players add FLAC feature to their products to meet the demand, so if you decide to go for FLAC — you might even be lost between all the available players! In the battle of FLAC vs. MP3 there are no winners or losers. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos. While the world is swiftly moving toward streaming, FLAC does offers several advantages over the Spotifys and Tidals of this world.

Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection.

Secondly, you don't need an internet connection to listen to your music, and while the Offline modes of both Tidal and Spotify enable you to use it on the subway, it still needs to be connected to the 'net at some point to get the files.

What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? Ripping is easy to do but you will need the right software for your computer. However, there are some devices that enable you to rip and store FLAC files on a networked hard drive without having to ever touch a PC; the Bluesound Vault is one of these. If you'd rather pay someone else to do that for you, we cover our favorite sites for buying FLAC files here. Hi-fi: Of course, the biggest advantage to FLAC files is that they are ideally suited to listening on a hi-fi device.

In the last few years, a wealth of streaming audio players have appeared with lossless FLAC playback one of their many benefits. Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured , a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever barring storage catastrophes. Editors' note, October 28, : This article was originally published in October and has been updated with new information.

But if it's a download which I can only find an MP3 of, that's fine. I don't really care. There isn't really a quiet enough space for you to realistically hear the difference. And for sample rates larger than hz you can't hear those frequencies. So unless you want frequencies recorded that your dog can only hear there isn't a point to it for a mere consumer. On lossless vs. You have a stand in for the original and trans-code for your target device. For example if you have a limited storage and your intended listening is a noisy train you can transcode to a heavily compressed low bit-rate lossy format.

If you are listening in your PC you can listen to the flac directly as storage space isn't as much of an issue. You can transcode to the appropriate codec and bitrate for your use-cases as much as you want as your master is a perfect copy of the original. Like a photocopy machine little mistakes are made, transcoding from a lossy format to another lossy format is like copying a copy.

You copy the artifacts of the lossy master and add the artifacts that your new codec has. Lossless is good for archiving and as a base to transcode from. I bet you wouldn't be able to hear the difference between the two no matter how good hearing you have, unless you know specifically what to listen for.

The reason to use lossless formats is if you are processing the audio and you need the full signal. Having a lossly format will cause distortions because it is estimating what the sound will be like.