FLAC is an acronym meaning “Free Lossless Audio Codec”. FLAC is open-source and supports meta-data (i.e. tag information) that is read by media players (artist, track, title, album, and so on). Despite being not as ‘compact’ as various other compression schemes,

– FLAC is gaining in popularity for a couple of reasons. First, memory is getting cheaper and cheaper. Thus, the ‘penalty’ of having only a 50% reduction in file size is becoming less and less of an issue. Second, it’s truly lossless. For audiophiles and those who truly care about sound quality, this is an important distinction, because even though compressed, all of the fidelity is maintained – it is a lossless codec.

– Finally, it is an open-source code, which means that it can be widely supported by various software and hardware providers.