In recent years storage space and bandwidth have greatly decreased in price. As a consequence, there is a renewed interest in lossless audio.

Lossless audio, given by a "wav" file is inefficient. It can be replaced by a flac file which is also lossless and on average about 1/2 as large. A high quality ogg file at quality 8 (q8) is not lossless, but is about 1/6 the size of the corresponding wav file. It is very difficult to hear any difference between ogg -q8 and flac.

Future releases of audio will be in flac, ogg and mp3.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and Apple discourage the use of Vorbis products, which include flac and ogg

The software "mplayer" very freely available plays all these formats.

Five audio files below compare flac to ogg -q8

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