[Richard Pryor on Fire]

1. What can I use to play them?

2. How do I convert them to mp3?

3. Thanks so much, yr swell.

[Everyneurotic]

there's this thing called flac frontend, it converts files from flac to wav and vice versa, google for it...furthermore, there are plug ins for winamp to play flac files, check out winamp.com

atari is the expert on flacs here, though.

[!@#$%!]

flac frontend to do/undo

or flac winamp plugin for playback (winamp 5.31 & up have native suport, so just upgrade?)

and to turn to mp3 simply unfold to wav then compress w/ favorite encoder (i like razor lame)

dbpoweramp can handle both steps into 1 i think

[Richard Pryor on Fire]

Thanks guys, my misfits box sex is now listenable...!

[Everyneurotic]

!@#$%! is not as lazy as me.

[!@#$%!]

preferrably i should say dont mp3 a flac file as you will lose audio quality, unless you wanna pop it into a flash/portable player.

the flac converted to WAV can also be burneDD to CD

[Richard Pryor on Fire]

Yeah, I want to put it on my ipod, I got that 4 disc misfits box set and I'm stolked, but I don't know what unfolding is....

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Richard Pryor on Fire

Yeah, I want to put it on my ipod, I got that 4 disc misfits box set and I'm stolked, but I don't know what unfolding is....

oh shit that "unfolding" is just bad language on my part.

flac is a compressed audio file, and it's LOSSless. so you can go back & forth between flac & wav (or aiff in mac) without loss of quality. compress/decompress. if you go wav1 -> flac -> wav2, wav1 will be identical to wav2. no loss.

mp3 is also compressed but LOSSY. if you go wav1 -> mp3 -> wav2, there will be loss of quality. in other ways, wav1 sounds better than wav2.

anyway you generally need to decompress your FLAC into WAV format before you convert to MP3. step 1: use flac frontend to "decompress" your flacs into wavs. step 2: use your favorite mp3 encoder (say, itunes). some programs can handle that in a single step, but if it's too much headache just do it like this.

[Torn Curtain]

I use Foobar as a player. It will also convert the flac files into wav.

[tesla69]

"flac is a compressed audio file, and it's LOSSless."

thats not exactly true, its just less of a data loser than other compression schemes. BIT FOR BIT TRANSFERS is the only way to go....

[atari 2600]

Free Lossless Audio Codec

For all intents and purposes it is lossless.
Maybe you should e-mail jcoalson@users.sourceforge.net and correct him.


Since FLAC is an open-source project, it's important to have a set of goals that everyone works to. They may change slightly from time to time but they're a good guideline. Changes should be in line with the goals and should not attempt to embrace any of the anti-goals.

Goals

• FLAC should be and stay an open format with an open-source reference implementation.
• FLAC should be lossless. This seems obvious but lossy compression seems to creep into every audio codec. This goal also means that flac should stay archival quality and be truly lossless for all input. Testing of releases should be thorough.
• FLAC should yield respectable compression, on par or better than other lossless codecs.
• FLAC should allow at least realtime decoding on even modest hardware.
• FLAC should support fast sample-accurate seeking.
• FLAC should allow gapless playback of consecutive streams. This follows from the lossless goal.
• The FLAC project owes a lot to the many people who have advanced the audio compression field so freely, and aims also to contribute through the open-source development of new ideas.

Anti-goals

• Lossy compression. There are already many suitable lossy formats (Ogg Vorbis, MP3, etc.).
• Copy prevention, DRM, etc. There is no intention to add any copy prevention methods. Of course, we can't stop someone from encrypting a FLAC stream in another container (e.g. the way Apple encrypts AAC in MP4 with FairPlay), that is the choice of the user.