MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - FLAC Support Coming to Chrome and Firefox this Month.

GtrsRGr8 · 01-14-2017, 05:01 PM

I hope that this forum is the correct place to put a post like the one below. This post has to do with recorded music. Although there is a thread, "Media Deals (non-eBook/non-audiobook)," it is in the "Deals, Freebies, and Resources" forum," and this post doesn't really fall squarely under either one of those rubrics.

The website BleepingComputer.com made a post today that states that two major browsers, Firefox (from Mozilla) and Chrome (from Google) are adding support for the FLAC audio format this month.

I am an almost complete ignoramus when it comes to music and electronics, so I am not quite sure that I know what that means. I use the Google Chrome browser and have had no problem playing FLAC-formatted music. However, I have always played them on external applications like Windows Media Player, iTunes, Groove, etc. after I have downloaded them. Perhaps this new development will allow FLAC music to be played directly in the browsers themselves? I didn't see anything in the BleepingComputer.com post that would shed some light on this--I suppose that they assume that anyone who would actually visit their website would already know that information.

Despite being musically- and electronically-challenged, I do know that FLAC is a very high quality format (one music publisher, at least, calls it "studio quality"). Part of the reason for the high quality, I think, is the fact that it is "lossless"--other formats (e.g., MP3) are "lossy," because they are compressed. There is some slight data (read: music quality) loss because of the compression.

Anyway, if you'd like to read the whole article (it's not very long), you can find it at this BleepingComputer.com webpage.

01-14-2017, 05:01 PM	#1
GtrsRGr8 Grand Sorcerer Posts: 7,334 Karma: 27815322 Join Date: Aug 2012 Location: Southeastern U.S., ya'll Device: Kindle; Kindle (10.1.1) for PC; Kindle Cloud Reader	FLAC Support Coming to Chrome and Firefox this Month. I hope that this forum is the correct place to put a post like the one below. This post has to do with recorded music. Although there is a thread, "Media Deals (non-eBook/non-audiobook)," it is in the "Deals, Freebies, and Resources" forum," and this post doesn't really fall squarely under either one of those rubrics. The website BleepingComputer.com made a post today that states that two major browsers, Firefox (from Mozilla) and Chrome (from Google) are adding support for the FLAC audio format this month. I am an almost complete ignoramus when it comes to music and electronics, so I am not quite sure that I know what that means. I use the Google Chrome browser and have had no problem playing FLAC-formatted music. However, I have always played them on external applications like Windows Media Player, iTunes, Groove, etc. after I have downloaded them. Perhaps this new development will allow FLAC music to be played directly in the browsers themselves? I didn't see anything in the BleepingComputer.com post that would shed some light on this--I suppose that they assume that anyone who would actually visit their website would already know that information. Despite being musically- and electronically-challenged, I do know that FLAC is a very high quality format (one music publisher, at least, calls it "studio quality"). Part of the reason for the high quality, I think, is the fact that it is "lossless"--other formats (e.g., MP3) are "lossy," because they are compressed. There is some slight data (read: music quality) loss because of the compression. Anyway, if you'd like to read the whole article (it's not very long), you can find it at this BleepingComputer.com webpage.