FLAC

    Description #

    FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec (file extension: .flac). This format allows your audio files to be compressed to around half the size of a WAVE file, without losing any information (lossless compression). Storing audio files in a lossless format is really important when ecoacoustics starts to be scaled up. This means storing files is cheaper, and transferring them gets easier.

    You can open and listen to FLAC files in most commonly used audio software, such as Raven1 and Audacity. AnalysisPrograms.exe (AP.exe) can run analysis (i.e.: calculate indices and segment) on FLAC files. However, some analysis tools may not support FLAC, in which case you will be required to convert your files to WAVE. See the Converting audio files section for more information.

    1. Note: Raven can read FLAC files, but can’t export audio files as FLAC. If you make changes to the audio file in Raven that you wish to save, you can save the audio as a WAVE file. ↩︎