FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) it is an lossless audio format similar to MP3, but the audio is compressed with FLAC without any loss in quality. In opposition, MP3 is a lossy audio format.
The main characteristics of this audio codec are:
- reduce the size of the audio file
- preserve the quality of the original source
and these are enough reasons to use FLAC format to store your music.
Because it is a relatively new audio codec, there aren’t many audio players that can support this type of audio codec. For example, to play .flac files in Winamp you need to install additional plugins.
If you want to create your own audio CDs based on .flac files there is a problem with audio burning software because it doesn’t support the format. The solution is to convert the .flac files to .wav files and then to burn them on CD with your preferred burner.
The are many solutions to convert .flac files to .wav files. Some use other applications, like Winamp (How to convert .flac files to .mp3 using Windows solution by Simple Help), but the quickest and simplest solution is to use the audio codec itself.
In order to do that:
- download the FLAC audio codec from http://sourceforge.net/projects/flac/ (the zip version and not the Windows installer)
- extract the flac.exe file from the zip archive (at the post time, the latest version is flac-1.2.1-win.zip) and copy it in the music folder that contains .flac files (lets suppose it is D:\Muzik)
- open command prompt, Start –> cmd
- go to the muzik directory D:\Muzik; in order to do that, type
- cd d:\Muzik and hit Enter (in MS-DOS, cd is the command that changes the current directory)
- d: and hit Enter
- now the command prompt looks like this: d:\Muzik>_
- decompress the .flac files with the next command:
d:\Muzik> for %F in (*.flac) do flac –d “%F”
After the last command, you will see how each file will be decompress to the corresponding .wav file, that can be burned with ease with any audio burner software.
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