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Lossless audio codec joins Xiph

30 January 2003 3:20 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny

Development team of FLAC (or Free Lossless Audio Codec) has decided to join forces with Xiph, the development organization behind Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, IceCast and various other free-of-charge open source multimedia platforms.

FLAC is a fine addition to the existing Xiph family of multimedia platforms as it doesn't compete with lossy compression codecs such as Ogg Vorbis. The "Lossless" in its name means that the encoded music doesn't lose any information whatsoever and can be brought back to the original quality by simply decoding the file. This is not the case with lossy formats, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis in audio world or in video world, DivX and MPEG-2. In lossy formats, part of the original audio (or video) is actually removed, the material will be twisted and changed to "sound like" the original, but not exactly like the original. And lossy formats can't be decoded back to match the original files. The difference is somewhat like making a 500-page novel into smaller size by using smaller characters -- that would be lossless, since it is in smaller physical size, but all the information is still there -- compared to an Reader's Digest abbrevation of a novel -- the story is pretty much the same, but you can't start guessing all the details that are missing and therefor can't be an identical version to the original.

Anyway, FLAC team will now use Xiph's development resources and integrate their work tightly with the other Xiph Foundation's projects.

Full story: Xiph.org

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