What is the difference between FLAC format and other digital audio codecs?

Since its inception, the digital industrysound did not experience a particular shortage of formats that were used for its preservation and playback. Of course, the average user most of all knows the old MP3, but to this day it is crowded with other, higher-quality and modern codecs.

Currently, one of the most common among music lovers is the FLAC format. Its distinctive feature is a special compression algorithm, in which there is almost no loss of quality.

Differing from the oldest and most widelyused codecs, it does not remove any "extra" data from the audio stream, and therefore it is perfect for especially demanding music lovers. The sound of this quality is ideal not only for playback on the Hi-End class equipment, but also for creating your own personal music collection.

To this day, the FLAC format is supported by allcomputer programs for listening to music. However, every year there are more and more hardware solutions that allow the user to enjoy his great sound.

This codec includes metadata packagesStreaminfo, frames and four bytes of FLAC. Firstly, bytes perform the role of the identifier of the entire stream, after which metadata is decoded, followed by the compressed audio itself. The metadata itself and the audio stream constantly alternate between themselves. In addition, the incoming data stream is divided into blocks, after which they are independently coded.

After the encoding they are compressed, they occur"Stacking" in frames. What is even better, the FLAC format assumes the use of blocks of different sizes, which allows you to maintain excellent sound quality.

It's no wonder that splitting sound into blocksis one of the most critical stages of coding. The size of each element is determined based on a number of characteristics of the initial material. If you decide to increase the number of such blocks when encoding, then you get too many elements that alternate with the frames. Of course, in this case, the compression efficiency will be an order of magnitude lower.

However, when you use too muchsize codec also can not choose the optimal model of data compression. It is believed that in most cases it is necessary to use from 2 to 6 thousand samples. Set the same amount of discretion needed at 44.1 kHz. So the FLAC format will be able to reveal its full potential.

Please note that after selecting this indicatorthe signal will approximate. That's how the result of this process should be written down as little as possible. Professionals call it a "remnant". In it, the parameters of the function itself, which was used for compression, must be encoded.

By the way, the approximation can be of two types.When there is a need to convert the format of FLAC to MP3, the same encoded data is used, otherwise the high quality of the output file should not be expected.

Thus, this codec is one of theleaders of modern digital sound, as it can provide the highest quality of compressed music. Of course, the FLAC file format does not provide for the compact size of the resulting file, but it was not created for this either.