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Chrome is Getting the Ability To Play FLAC (theverge.com)
Audiophiles are getting a new way to listen to one of the top formats for lossless music. From a report: Google has begun adding FLAC support to Chrome, and it should be rolling out to the masses very soon. FLAC support is already live in Chrome's beta build and it's live in the current version of Chrome OS, too. If you have local FLAC files or come across one on the web, the added support allows Chrome to open it up in a completely bare-bones music player that takes over the entire tab. It's not exactly elegant, but it works. And it means that Mac users with Chrome installed will have an easy way to play back FLAC files should they come across one. While there are plenty of apps that can handle FLAC -- VLC being a popular one -- no native macOS app is capable of it. Windows 10, on the other hand, includes native support.
FLAC is just an audio compression codec, like MP3, but lossless full CD quality. Not sure why it's so hard to implement like any other codec. It's not a new codec, either, but adoption has been very slow. I was playing FLAC files back in the days of Rockbox on my magnetic-HDD based MP3 player iRiver H100, but that required custom firmware. I don't think I've ever seen an MP3 player that out of the box supports FLAC.
With bandwidth and storage increasing every day I'm surprised that FLAC hasn't caught on better than it has. It hasn't kept pace with video quality increases which went from 480i to 4K/UHD during it's lifetime. Any day now?
You mean, except for the one that was listed off immediately prior to that assertion? Though VLC is cross-platform, the Mac version is native to macOS.
I think what they meant to say was that no first-party apps support FLAC, but even that's not strictly true, since you can use Fluke or other utilities to enable support for FLAC in iTunes, QuickTime, and other first-party apps. Or maybe they meant that no Mac-exclusive apps support FLAC, but that's not true either, since there are plenty of Mac-only apps that can operate on FLAC files (e.g. Rogue Amoeba's Fission).
FLAC support isn't baked in, to be sure, but there have been simple ways to use FLAC files on Macs for the vast majority of the format's lifespan. I'm even planning to go through and re-rip my entire collection to FLAC in the next few months.
Firefox will do it too!
Firefox added FLAC support in Firefox 51
FLAC offers little if anything in terms of increased audio quality above high bitrate lossy audio. With double blind tests it's not even clear there really IS a difference.
The real advantage of FLAC is for audio editing . A FLAC file can be edited and saved without affecting the quality of the audio. That isn't true for lossy audio codecs, such as MP3. Every time that you edit and save an MP3 file, the new file has poorer audio quality. If you only make one edit, you might not notice the drop in quality. But if you repeatedly edit-and-save the file, then the loss of quality will eventually become noticable.