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FLAC

FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, is a music compression system that accurately reproduces the original bitstream. A lossy scheme, like MP3, is able to so drastically compress music because it removes audio information that the human ear is not likely to notice being missing.  When a lossy file is played back, it sounds very much like the original recording, so much so that very few people notice the change. There are those listeners, however, who are sensitive to how the lossy compression changes the file, hearing "artifacts", noises introduced by the compression process. Lossless compression schemes like FLAC avoid these artifacts by compressing the music such that, once uncompressed, the file is bit-for-bit the same as the original. As a result of storing all that data, FLAC files are much larger than MP3s, typically reducing original file size by 30% - 50%, compared to MP3's greater than 80%. Though originally an obscure format, more and more personal media players are supporting FLAC files, including SanDisk and Cowon models.

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