Freesound is struggling with download formats and there’s an interesting discussion shaping up on their new blog which includes the author of FLAC.

Open formats only ever made sense to me as admin for the site if they are practical (e.g. MP3 has IP issues but there’s no getting around it’s popularity).

Before running this site I used RAR format to archive personal projects but it wasn’t open. FLAC is what we use for album tracks (like Bucky and Vadim) because, popular or not, it’s extremely handy and does have usable GUI tools.

I’ve been pushing for people to upload more FLACs for a long time now. It’s a great format, especially for full (non-looped) tracks that have a lot of silence.

As far as I know it offers the best trade-off between audio quality and size and it’s lossless to boot, so my it doesn’t distort in bad ways when you put effects on it.

“ jc” in the comments at the article you linked to makes some really good points. FLAC is pretty widely supported and if more people start using it, there will be more support.

The official FLAC site has very simple tools for converting to and from .wav and other formats. Trust me, it’s really easy to do this, and encoding losslessly is always going to make anything that samples you sound that much better.

Also, it’s a bit off-topic but I seem to recall the Bucky Johnson stuff was in MP3 format.

I use FLAC samples from time to time, but my softstudio does not convert FLAC as readily as many other formats. Thus, if a sample here or in freesound is in FLAC, I tend to use it less often. I agree that if everyone used it, then it would be more useful to me because more software would account for it. I feel similarly about ogg, and yet until that use comes, it’s just extra steps to deal with samples for me. FLAC is a very good format, and nothing against it, really. It’s just a little more hassle in my softstudio. I can convert it and use it, but it’s not quite as integrated as other formats.

Quote: fourstonesthere’s an interesting discussion shaping up on their new blog which includes the author of FLAC.

thanks so much for this link fourstones, i’ve been totally “turned on” to flac! i’ve started posting flac files to ccmixter in addition to wav and mp3 or do you do guys prefer we post a limited number of formats? or is storage space not a problem (i imagine it is to some extent since you don’t allow uploading of wav files)?