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FLAC Joins The Xiph Family

Posted by timothy on from the with-hard-drives-this-cheap dept.

Ancipital writes "Xiph.org (of Ogg Vorbis fame) have today announced that the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) project has joined the Xiph rebel alliance. The full story and press release can be found at the Xiph site. (FLAC is nice, because it gives you pristine lossless audio at roughtly 50% size reduction over uncompressed WAVs- you can store them on your hard drive/wherever and then transcode down to a lossy format when you need portability, yum!)"

1 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Missing the Point by dewboy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I think many posters are missing the point of the article. My first reaction was also "hey, this is nothing new -- SHN (Shorten) has been around for a long time and does lossless encoding at 50% the size of WAV"... but then I actually went to the Xiph site and read their mission:

    "Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation dedicated to protecting the foundations of Internet multimedia from control by private interests. Our purpose is to support and develop free, open protocols and software to serve the public, developer and business markets."

    So the point isn't that FLAC is new... the point is that FLAC is OSS, and has joined forces with an organization backing such efforts. The SHN codec is not OSS.