FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a lossless size compression method for digital music information. Read about the comparison between mp3 and FLAC and how to open it.
A file with the *.flac extension can store music compressed using the Free Lossless Audio Codec, as well as formats high resolution DSD DoP or MQA.

"Lossless" means "the original and restored digital audio material is completely identical."

If the sequence "1234" is compressed in size into a certain sequence (for example, "97"), then after unpacking the latter we again have "1234".

Watch and Share: DSD vs FLAC Comparison

In addition to Free Lossless Audio Codec software decoders, there are also hardware ones built into portable audio players (DAPs). Although in reality a DAP or mobile phone is a small computer that runs a program to encode or decode a music format.

A single large *.flac file can be a music album container along with a CUE index file that contains the starting time points for each track.

Free Lossless Audio Codec is supported by Xiph.Org Foundation.

Open software libraries (open-source) at the time of writing are available for operating systems Windows systems, Unix family (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, Amiga.

FLAC converters

1. AuI ConverteR 48x44 (Win, Mac)
2. XLD (Mac)
3. Foobar 2000 (Win)

1. How to Convert ISO to FLAC for Mac and Windows [User Guide] (EN) >

How to play FLAC files (software players)

1. Foobar 2000 (Win)
2. VOX (Mac)
3. AIMP (Win)

FLAC file and iTunes

FLAC file is not compatible with popular player iTunes. However, FLAC can be converted to AIFF while preserving the metadata (including images). FLAC can also be converted to ALAC (*.m4a resolution), which provides lossless compression.

When converting files for iTunes, you need to ensure metadata compatibility. For example, if you are using the FLAC converter AuI ConverteR, in the settings Settings > Metadata> check the checkbox Compatibility metatags with iTunes.

I know you wanted this. Waited. Demanded. And you will get it! There is no time or need to explain. Under the cut – Top 10 music smartphones.

There is sound. And it's all.

The first category of our participants can most accurately be designated as Dinosaurs. Ancient, like the steam iron of your neighbor, Baba Mani, in your dacha. Their hardware characteristics can now only make you smile. But nevertheless, they cope with audio tasks better than 99% of modern performance titans. That’s why they can still often be seen in the hands of audiophiles. Let's begin!

10th place

In no way inferior to the HTC G8, the “Chinese” is simply created for experiments by inquisitive geeks. Hence the abundance of firmware, dominated by the CM12S, which provides full support for FLAC 24/192 right out of the box.

6th place

Unlike the descriptions of other participants in our Top 10 that have entered the market, judgments about this gadget will not be objective. Since I don’t “know” him personally. In this case, due to the strange absence of Idol 3 in official Ukrainian retail, I am forced to rely on other people's reviews. But these reviews are often extremely positive. Therefore, the “dark horse” Idol 3 opens the dominant group of our rating.

3rd place

Xiaomi Mi4i, Xiaomi Mi Note – two pairs of boots. Owners of the current top-end ESS Saber ES9018K2M. Unconditional support for FLAC 24/192.

Different screen diagonals. Various positioning. But a unified approach. And with their characteristic diligence, they carry out the tasks assigned to them, earning back every invested yuan. With Mi4i you will even find full support for DSD128!

2nd place

The golden mean in everything.

The hardware platform from LG G4, improved with a more advanced camera module and finally receiving a decent DAC (ES9018C2M installed here). It differs from its older brother K2M only in the lack of DSD support. But the ratio of sound quality, support for FLAC 24/192 and a more advanced hardware platform than previous participants bring it to 2nd place in our rating.

1 place

Meizu MX4 Pro, Meizu Pro 5. Owners of not only the top-end ES9018K2M, but also a decent final audio path.

High quality film capacitors. Not bad output opamps. Full support for FLAC 24/192 after the latest updates. Great performance. SuperAMOLED and energy efficient platform Samsung Exynos. All this makes the couple the undisputed leaders. Of course, you can swear at the lack of a slot for memory cards. But weighing all the advantages of the same MX4 Pro, I don’t want to do this. Clear victory. 1st place and the title of the best Hi-Fi smartphones of 2015.

That's all for today. I know you have a lot of questions. “Where is Sony?”, “Why not Samsung S6?” etc. Feel free to ask them in the comments. I'll try to answer everything. See you later:)

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Recently, players supporting the FLAC format, which is highly valued by most audiophiles, have been rapidly developing. What is the secret of the format? What is wrong with music connoisseurs about the popular mp3 format?

The birth of mp3

At the dawn of digital audio, the first music format was Wave, which became widespread on CD-Audio discs. At that moment there was no hard drives large capacity, and the album size of 700 MB seemed very large. With the advent of high-performance microcircuits, the mp3 format was invented, which allowed music to take up 10 times less disk space (~70 MB versus 700 MB). This made it possible to significantly increase the number of musical compositions that listeners had at home on their computer and in the first Flash players. The original format was superseded during the “mp3 boom” due to its high weight.

Many people remember the incredibly popular iriver players that support mp3 and ogg, but the time of those players has passed and to replace iriver they released Astel&Kern players with support for FLAC in Hi-Res.

MP3 information compression and quality

Why does mp3 take up less space? It is based on two technologies: archiving and psychoacoustic compression. Conventional archiving is not very efficient and is only used in Lossless formats such as flac, ape and wavepack. Psychoacoustic compression has been added to mp3 and this format belongs to the Lossy group (lossy compression).

Psychoacoustic compression thins out data by simple principle: anything that the listener potentially cannot hear (for example quiet sounds against the background of loud ones), then it is mercilessly thrown out. There are many parallels that can be drawn with video and photography. For example, in jpg format, pixels of similar colors are grouped into large squares of the same color, and when forming a picture, we usually do not notice that various nuances have disappeared. But if we want to look closely, we will definitely see it!

The quality of the same mp3 bitrate is different

There are a large number of mp3 encoders, and each has its own level of priorities in the algorithm, what is the least important in music, and what to remove first at low compression, and what to delete last at high compression. The higher the compression, the more meaningful information is thrown out and the easier it is to hear on simple audio equipment.

Unfortunately, the sound quality of mp3 depends not only on the degree of compression expressed in bitrate, but also on what codec it was compressed with and with what settings. Very often they use a high bitrate of the order of 320 kB/s, but with the least resource-intensive and fast mode coding. The file is encoded very quickly, but in the end it subjectively sounds worse than encoded at 128 kB/s in resource-intensive and time-consuming mode.

Almost all “mp3 producers” in the form of websites and disc collections use fast algorithms, because They believe that the majority will still not hear the difference in their phones, and will focus their purchase only on the bitrate. Why spend extra effort if they buy so well?


The differences between mp3 at 320 kB/s, encoded in a high-quality resource-intensive mode, and the original Wave are indeed very small and are sometimes difficult to distinguish even with good audio equipment, but such mp3s are usually very few and only made by enthusiasts. The bulk of mp3 leaves a depressing impression.
Much depends on the decoder, which determines the final sound quality. There are still battles on forums about which software or hardware player sounds better with which decoder.
In the boom of development of mp3 players quality and sound cards left much to be desired, especially in light of the fact that the main users of mp3 were those who could not afford to listen to music from a good Hi-Fi system. Quality issues were barely noticeable, similar to JPG compression issues when viewed through a screen mobile phone. But on a good audio path this was obvious. Technologies have recently stepped forward and most sources have increased in quality, and accordingly, the shortcomings of mp3 have become more obvious.

What are the main disadvantages usually noted in the sound of mp3?

• Absence or unnaturalness high frequencies(due to the strong reduction of high frequencies, which supposedly most cannot hear)
• Wheezing and distortion on vocals, unnatural timbres of instruments
• Violation of the location of sources in space

But most importantly, you never know how high quality an mp3 will sound, how much information is actually lost in it.

Lossless formats

As soon as available hard disks large capacity and high-speed Internet, the need for strong compression disappeared and Lossless formats began to gain popularity.


Lossless uses only normal archiving of audio data, without throwing out any information and providing a bit-by-bit copy after decompression. This compression allows you to reduce the weight of the file from 1/3 to 2/3, depending on the source data. The ancestor of Lossless formats was the Ape format. Later, the most widespread was free flac, which supports multimedia information (genres, covers, built-in “cue”, etc.). Due to its free nature and wider capabilities, the format has gained the highest popularity and the word flac is often used as a synonym for the word Lossless.

The difference in sizes after compression for different Lossless formats varies quite slightly and for portable players only the degree of compression is critical, which affects the cost of chip resources for decompressing files. Most players support Ape and flac, while wavepac (wv extension) can only be played on computers or smartphones with Android system with the installation of a separate player with a corresponding decoder.

Flac or mp3?

If you want to receive good sound, then it is better to choose a format where supposedly “unnecessary” information is not cut out. Many people distinguish the sound quality of mp3 from Flac even on smartphones that support flac, and here it is unnecessary to talk about specialized players such as Colorfly C4 Pro, iBasso DX100 or HiFiMan HM 901, specially created for lossless formats to unlock the full potential of the original format.

Key features of mp3, flac and wave