It was originally developed by Microsoft and IBM and stores uncompressed lossless audio which results in very large file sizes. One minor drawback is that the file sizes can be huge which can make them a little impractical.Ī file with the WAV file extension is a Waveform audio file format and is a container that stores data in segments. As they are stored in an uncompressed format they are enormously versatile and allow for easy editing and manipulation. It was originally developed back in 1991 for use within Windows 3.1 but today it is the gold standard in studio recording and one of the most popular digital audio formats. The WAV file is one of the simplest digital audio file formats. The metadata associated with the audio has been future proofed also to allow new fields to be defined without impacting existing decoders. A FLAC file also contains several data integrity checks in the header file. The main benefits of a FLAC file in addition to it being lossless is that it can be used for streaming, and decoding is fast, allowing for real time decoding to take place.

Using FLAC to compress an audio file to approximately 50% of its original size. FLAC is a format that is recommended to those backing up a CD collection because the sound quality will remain high, whereas MP3 compression will result in a deterioration compared to the original. It is a lossless compression type meaning that the compression takes place without data being discarded. Free Lossless Audio Codec, or FLAC for short, is an audio compression technique.

How to convert flac to wav windows 10