New
#1
Read more...We knew it was coming and in the latest build of Windows 10 that leaked, FLAC support is now native to the OS. This shouldn't come as a major surprise as Microsoft already teased support for FLAC and now you can test it out for yourself.
FLAC stands for 'Free Lossless Audio Codec' and can shrink a file to roughly 50-60% of its original size; when decompressed the file goes back to its original state. It's important to note that this is OS level support, so any Win32 or modern app will be able to take advantage of this feature.
I'm never really happy when something messes with files for no other reason than to save space when space is not an issue,
Cheers.
Hi there
Flac is fine -- it's LOSSLESS compression and a FREE non proprietary codec -- Space is often an issue say on things like USB drives and micro SDHC cards -- I'd prefer a high quality lossless codec any time over any sort of proprietary stuff.
WAV is fine too but even if you have a decent amount of space what's wrong with FLAC - you can get much more music.
MKV is just a container so I'm not sure why there ever was a problem with it - If VLC (which is FREE) can play it then windows should too.
However Windows Media is a bit late to the party now so I can't see that this announcement will make any significant difference - except possibly XBOX users who can play MKV files already by various means.
Cheers
jimbo
With most compression stuff there's always the possibility of corruption is the only issue I can see,
For myself space is not an issue I prefer to leave files in a original state on what ever device
Cheers.
Hi there
Lossless compression is exactly that LOSSLESS - and the FLAC algorithms have been around long enough now to know that there is utterly no problem with them.
Saying you *might* get corruption using the algorithm is like saying you would rather calculate a load of numbers manually rather than use a spreadsheet / calculator as you are less likely to get an error !!!. The only sort of data corruption you'd get with FLAC is if your HDD starts getting hardware errors --this could just as easily happen to things like WAV files too.
By all means choose formats you are happy with but the reasoning you present here is dubious to say the least.
In the event of truly unlimited storage then there isn't a problem using no compression at all - but if you want to carry high quality music between two places and you only have a mobile phone with a micro sdHC card then I'm quite happy to stick the files as FLAC on the device. Portable storage isn't usually unlimited and I HATE Cloud services.
Now for those who say you can't listen to very high quality audio on a mobile because the quality of the DAC's isn't that great -- true but what I do is then copy the music from the phone to a device at the remote location and THEN play it. I can convert to WAV if need be but decent pre-amps can handle FLAC anyway. So I'm basically just using the phones micro SDHC card as a storage device which can hold about DOUBLE the quantity of music than it would do if using WAV. I don't bother with compressed mp3 formats at all - those are both compressed and LOSSY.
Cheers
jimbo
mp3-mp4 is fine to me and sounds great where ever they are played :)
But then again I'm not listening to opera either
Cheers.