Hi:

What do people generally do with FLAC files? Do they directly play them either with a stand-alone player or with the computer or, on the contrary, they first create audio CDs with them? Please understand my post is not about not knowing what a FLAC file is. I've used programs that create an audio CD from a FLAC file many times and also, others that haven't been converted, I play them directly. Thanks in advance.

As far as I understand it, FLAC is mainly popular for
a) losslessly backing up music CDs or
b) for audiophiles which can't tolerate even the extremely small quality losses resulting from storing music as mp3s (or ogg vorbis) at 320 kbps or so

FLAC is also used by people who fear that if they switch music players, they would have to recode their audio (with big quality losses), in order to play their audio on the new device. Instead, they have one FLAC copy, and use it to generate whatever format is supported by their current MP3 player without any quality loss.

Well, it all comes down to what player(s) you intend to use, doesn't it? For software players (and a few of the more flexible hardware types) you can get direct flac support, so you can take advantage of its smaller file size and tag metadata storage.

But most stand-alone hardware CD players only accept your standard audio CD. If you intend to play your music on one of those, then that's what you need.

It's really the same for any compressed audio format. You can benefit from the reduced size and extra features, but only if you have access to a player that can handle them. Whereas CD-audio is useable pretty much everywhere.

One other benefit with lossless codecs like flac is that they are also perfect for archiving audio back-ups. You can usually fit a dozen or more flac-compressed albums onto a single DVD-R. I've backed-up some of my rarer CDs in this way.


Most of my personal music collection is in the form of commercial CDs (I haunt the used cd shops a lot), so I rarely need to convert FROM flac. These days, though, I mostly listen on my computer and portable player, so I often rip discs TO compressed files. But I generally use high-quality ogg vorbis instead of flac for most of my daily listening. Vorbis is good enough for my purposes, and gives much smaller file sizes.

On those occasions when I do get hold of some audio in flac, I usually convert it to ogg as well and store the original away on a DVD-R.

Well, I think I now have at my disposition ample criteria to know what to do with my FLAC files, thanks to you (I understand in English "you" is a plural pronoun, as well as a singular one, but I never new how it is interpreted in the posts.) What I do not understand is, with all the metadata these files come with, why does the uploader not send a checksum? Thank you for your kind replies.

It isn't a big deal, but in this case, since more than one person has replied to your question, we don't know who you are referring to when you write, "..thanks to you.." - I would guess that it refers to the last person who posted.

Good alternatives would be:

..thanks to you both. # thanking two people.
..thanks to both of you. # thanking two people.
..thanks to all of you who have replied. # thanking some number of people (all of them).
Thanks to you all, ... # not as good as above; should be used at start of sentence.
Thanks to everyone who replied, ... # as above.
Thanks to you guys, ... # addressing a bunch of people; and 'you guys' often refers to both genders in casual speak. You could address a crowd of men and women with, "You guys are great!". But it doesn't work the other way around

"disposition" should probably be "disposal" in this case:
"I now have at my disposal ample criteria..." # "disposition" means attitude; temperament; mood: "A tasmanian devil has a nasty disposition.", i.e. it is a mean, nasty, cranky animal.

"new" would be "knew" in that case:
"I never knew how..." # implies that you do know how now; but would be better if written as follows:
"I've never known how..." # does not necessarily imply that you now know how..

Anyhow, I think it's been mentioned elsewhere: don't worry - your English is very good! Sorry for the off-topic - and, I cannot answer the question of the checksum.
Cheers!

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It's been very, very kind of you, GrapefruiTgirl, to have cleared my gramatical doubts. Thanks a lot.