I’m a big fan of FLAC, the super-high quality, Free Lossless Audio Codec. I have a bit of my music stored in FLAC. However, my iPod doesn’t support FLAC as it stands: the highest quality format is Apple Lossless, so I’ve been using that for a lot of my modern music.
Even some artists online are selling FLACs of their music for the high-def audiophiles out there. For example, Jonathan Coulton has a FLAC store.
A problem I have is that once I’ve bought said music and want to listen to it, or if I want to listen to …read more

Since the days of Napster, the Internet has been flowing with this magical, wonderful beast known as “MP3″. What is it, exactly?
Well, it’s a compression standard dating back to 1991 that shrinks the size of audio by throwing away parts we don’t hear very well. The higher the compression ratio, the more information is thrown away and the lesser the quality of sound.
Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot about audio compression in the years since 1991. After all, MP3 is part of the first set of standards on digital video set forth by MPEG (MP3 = …read more