FLAC
FLAC is short for Free Lossless Audio Coding. Unlike MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, FLAC uses lossless compression to reduce the size of files. This means that no audio is removed when the file is created, resulting in better quality sound. In fact, the sound from a FLAC file is indistinguishable from that of a professionally produced CD. Not only that, but you can convert a FLAC file to any other audio format without the quality of the sound degrading.
While FLAC files are compressed, they're larger than other compressed audio files. A standard audio CD will be compressed to about 300 MB using FLAC. That's really only slightly more than a 50% compression rate. It's good, but not great. The trade off is audio quality.
A number of desktop media players and portable audio players support FLAC. A growing number of artists are making their music available as FLAC files.
Lossy compression was important in the days of slow, dial-up Internet access and limited bandwidth. As broadband access becomes ubiquitous, however, lossless encoding is becoming more popular.
WMA
As you might imagine, Microsoft has its own audio format. That format is Windows Media Audio, or WMA for short. It's designed especially for use with the Windows Media Player that's built into the Windows operating system. You can play WMA files in other media players, even ones on other operating systems. Of course, most portable audio players support WMA. One exception, and this shouldn't be a surprise, is the Apple iPod.
As far as quality goes, at lower bit rates WMA files are virtually indistinguishable from MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files. At higher bit rates, though, WMA suffers in comparison -- the difference in quality is noticeable.
Recently, Microsoft added Digital Rights Management (also called DRM) to the WMA format. DRM restricts how and where you can use an audio file that was, say, downloaded from an online music service. For example, one use of DRM in audio files is to allow you to only play that file on a single computer or portable player. DRM has turned a number of users away from WMA and into the arms of MP3.
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