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FLAC
The etree.org community was formed by a crew of music geeks with a single goal: Trading live legal lossless audio. The common mantra "SHN via FTP" came about as the most popular means to that end. There will be lots of shn seeds circulating for a long time to come, and we'll always think fondly of shn.

However, times change and technology matures. At this point, flac is a compelling choice for seeding new shows.

This page discusses the Flac lossless audio encoding format. Much of the practical information for seeding and encoding shows is found in the FlacFaq, as well as in SeedingGuidelines and NamingStandards.

[FLAC] stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. This lossless audio codec has been under active development by a team led by Josh Coalson. FLAC has been designed to have flexibility to adjust to future technology advancements, and to move beyond the 'shortcomings' of Shorten. FLAC is superior to Shorten in the following ways:

Windows: [foobar2000] [Winamp 2] and [Winamp 5] (see FlacFaq re Winamp 3)
MacOS X: [Cog] (10.3.9+), [MacAmp Lite], [Videolan Media Player]
Linux: [Alsa Player], [MPlayer], [XMMS]
Large collections benefit from using [amarok] to organize and play their music
The biggest drawback to flac is that it's not supported on Mac OS 9. At this point, however, that consideration is far outweighed by flac's advantages.

If you're a Windows user, Mike Wren has created FlacFrontend, a highly recommended installer that will set up your PC to compress, decompress, verify, fingerprint and play FLAC files in Winamp or foobar2000.

Another alternative for windows media player users is [flac plugins for windows media player].

If you use Winamp 3 we recommend upgrading to [Winamp 5]. Winamp 5 = Winamp 2 + Winamp 3. All Winamp 2 plugins (FLAC/SHN/APE) work with Winamp 5.

If you're a Mac OS X user, Dan Greuel has created a GUI frontend called [MacFLAC] that will install the FLAC binaries, encode, and decode FLAC files.

Scott Brown has expanded on Dan's app and created [xACT], a Mac OS X GUI frontend for Shorten, FLAC, Monkey's Audio, Shntool and more.

See also FlacFrontend, FlacFingerprint, FlacFaq, SeedingGuidelines, NamingStandards, ReplayGain

This Page Last Changed: Mar 2, 2007 16:08:18
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