Neat (new?) iTunes Feature

[DreadPirateRoberts]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Non-music geek question - How large is a FLAC song in comparison to a more standard size, like 192?

Here's what one reference says:

"FLAC is for efficient packing of audio data, unlike general lossless algorithms such as ZIP and gzip. While ZIP may compress a CD-quality audio file by 10–20%, FLAC achieves compression rates of 30–50% for most music, with significantly greater compression for voice recordings. This leads to bitrates of roughly 800 - 950 kbit/s.

Lossy codecs can achieve ratios of 80% or more by discarding data from the original stream. FLAC uses linear prediction to convert the audio samples to a series of small, uncorrelated numbers (known as the residual), which are stored efficiently using Golomb-Rice coding. It also uses run-length encoding for blocks of identical samples, such as silent passages. The technical strengths of FLAC compared to other lossless codecs lie in its ability to be streamed and in a fast decode time, which is independent of compression level."