Slashdot Mirror
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.
Enjoy your stay.
What sort of speaker and amplifier hardware is required to reproduce FLAC such that you can actually notice a difference?
You can easily notice a visual difference of 480i -> 4K on a 4K monitory. Short of certain audiophile setups how many end users are going to actually notice FLAC vs other lossy options on their laptop speakers, headphones, etc?
Hard to answer. Nobody who spent many thousand bucks on a audio setup will admit it's impossible to tell the difference!