What is FLAC?

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC is a kind of lossless and oversimplified MP3. It was designed specifically for audio, which means that you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression.

more information - flac.sourceforge.net

Pros

• Portable to many systems
• Source open and freely licensed
• Hardware support (PhatBox, Kenwood MusicKeg, Rio Karma, etc. See below)
• Streaming support
• Extremely fast decoding
• Supports multichannel and high resolution streams
• Supports ReplayGain
• Supports cue-sheet (with some limitations)
• Gaining wide use as successor to Shorten

Cons

• Compresses less efficiently than other popular modern compressors (Monkey's Audio, LPAC, OptimFROG)
• Higher compression modes slow, for little gain over the default setting.

Total Audio Converter supports the following conversions with FLAC format files:

FLAC to MP3 FLAC to WMA FLAC to WAV FLAC to OGG FLAC to FLAC (change bitrate or frequency) FLAC to AAC FLAC to MP4 FLAC to MPC FLAC to APE

MP3 to FLAC WMA to FLAC WAV to FLAC OGG to FLAC RA to FLAC CDA to FLAC APE to FLAC APL to FLAC AAC to FLAC MPC to FLAC MPP to FLAC MP4 to FLAC OFR to FLAC SPX to FLAC TTA to FLAC WV to FLAC MOD to FLAC

Another supported audio formats

• MPEG Audio Layer format (MP3)
• Windows Media Audio format (WMA)
• WAVE audio format (WAV)
• OGG file format (OGG)
• Real Audio format (RA, RMM, RAM, RAX, RPM, RM, RMVB)
• Audio Tracks format (CDA)
• Free Lossless Audio Codec format (FLAC)
• Monkey's Audio format (APE, APL)
• Advanced audio coding (AAC, M4A)
• Musepack formats (MPP, MPC, MP+)
• MPEG-4 international standard (MP4)
• OptimFROG (OFR)
• Speex (SPX)
• True Audio codec (TTA)
• WavPack (WV)
• MOD music (MOD)