My buddy offered me a thumb drive full of music he’s recorded at a local cafe, and I’m really psyched to add it to my iPod, but it is all in a format that ITunes can’t seem to understand called "FLAC". What’s FLAC and how do you convert it to MP3 format, so I can appreciate it?

And The Answer:

Ah yes, the exciting world of audio codec’s. A codec is really a "compressor/decompressor" and it’s a software package that can successfully take a large amount of audio data and restructure it so that the resultant audio file has a smaller footprint. Think "Zip Archive" however, for music. The problem is, compression is usually at the price of fidelity, and a lot of audio compression algorithms drop data or else produce sound that does not quite possess the dynamic selection of the initial.

Consequently, audiophiles have developed some interesting codec’s that ensure none of the original audio information is lost as the file is coded for later listening, and chief the type of is FLAC, which means "Free Lossless Audio Codec". Issue is, FLAC isn’t supported by all the audio programs using the pc, you may already know from trying to get Apple ITunes to utilize it.

Fortunately, there are some pretty slick apps out there to convert audio files in one format to another, and something of my top picks is definitely an Australian program called Switch, from NCH Software. If you don’t have lots of files to transform, you may also download the demo and use that for this simple conversion task.

For your informations, you can use program for CoolUtils.com, like this flac converter to mp3.