The original lossless audio format was original digital audio format: Wave format - the WAV file.
Most people who have been using PCs for a while will have come across WAV files.
They are a lossless audio format.
In fact, typically WAV files do not even compress the data digitally, so the files are enormous. This has made them fairly useless for any serious quantity of music, until recently.
Somebody rightly points out that with hard drives being as huge as they are these days, most people could in fact store their whole music collection on a new hard drive, even using uncompressed Wave format.
But it seems a shame to use an uncompressed format when there are so many lossless compressed formats.
Even if you have got a huge hard drive, it makes sense to create the smallest files you can. Transferring files from one drive to another will take less time, for instance, if the total amount of data is smaller. And why waste drive space you don't have to?
One lossless audio format that is designed to compress the data is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). This audio format seems to have quite a lot of support, both software and hardware, and is already being used by several artitsts and music distributors as a way of offering high-fidelity music files.
Another lossless compressed format that has fans is Monkey's Audio. There seems to be no hardware support for this format, but several software applications support plug-ins that allow Monkey's Audio files to play.
Both FLAC and Monkey's Audio are open source, and free for anyone to use. Both offer a tagging or metadata, like the ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags that MP3 files offer, that store useful information about the music in each track, such as track number, track name, artist, album, year of release.
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