FLAC support added to iOS 11

thenextweb.com

10 points·VelNZ··6 comments

I didn't expect FLAC to be popular for as long as it has been. With just 30-40% savings over PCM, it reminds me of Stacker --which was popular in the days of 40MB hard drives, but abandoned when 100MB became cheap enough.

Maybe I'm old and grumpy. But for me, a RIFF-PCM .wav file is a format that can be parsed and completely understood by a smart high schooler in an afternoon. FLAC however... As an archive format it seems like a hugely complex system with a small payoff.

> ...reminds me of Stacker

Wow! That took me back! http://gunkies.org/wiki/Stacker

Oh the memories! When I was growing up my family's first PC was an Amsterdam 1512, but later on we had a truly awful 386SX-16MHz nameless IBM-PC clone. It had a paltry 40MB hard drive and I ran Stacker on it (later Doublespace when I upgraded to MS-DOS 6.22). God that thing was slow! The most fun I ever got out of it was when I ran dazzle.exe and marvelled at the pretty patterns (256 colours!) on the VGA screen.

QEMM, Super PC Quik, DeskView, Spinrite, hardcards, ...

Yes, I'm amazed that the CDs I ripped to FLAC 14 years ago still don't need conversion to a new format to play in all the software I use. I don't think I expected that when I ripped them.

It's important to understand that it's not only compression that gives FLAC an edge over AIFF/WAVE. Vorbis comments are an excellent way to save metadata in audio files.

If you want metadata, put it in a RIFF chunk.

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