Free Lossless Audio Codec

Free Lossless Audio Codec or FLAC is an Open Source format offering full CD quality audio (or better)

Besides the technical advantages a good thing about FLAC is that it’s not encumbered with any patents.

The FLAC is to be considered for saving and dissemination of the audio files on EUROPA.

Comparison with other lossless formats
WAV files are also lossless, with the difference being that FLAC uses non-destructive compression (like ZIP) and has better tagging options (showing artist, title and other information for songs). So the end result is that the FLAC files will sound exactly and precisely as good as the source, while being smaller in size compared to WAV files and better suited for music distribution. ALAC or Apple Lossless is a compressed lossless file format used by Apple and is supported by iTunes. In late 2011 the format has been made open source and royalty-free. WMA has also a possibility of using lossless compression called Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless which is supported by Windows Media Player. APE or Monkey's Audio is yet another alternative, though due to the lack of an official version for operating systems other than Windows, license problems and slow performance of codec the popularity of the format is minimal. Tests have shown that the level of compression is almost the same for FLAC, ALAC, WMA 9 Lossless and APE.

Compatibility
Most music players on computers support FLAC natively, but some big exceptions (iTunes, WMP) still don't. They can be upgraded with plugins so that they do play FLAC and you can also look at many of the alternative music players. The situation is similar for portable devices and media players, where Apple and Microsoft (as of now) don't offer native FLAC support, although there are applications which can add such functionality to their devices. The latest Android phones support it by default and for other smartphones there are free applications which allow you to play FLAC, if you wish to do so.