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Ria Radio Podcast 2012 January 10 (Broadcast 07:00 - 08:00)

Lossless Formats

Increasingly, proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe are pushing video and audio formats that restrict access .

There is an alternative that can be played on all computers without restriction — Ogg. With Ogg, lossless professional grade multimedia formats such as Vorbis, Theora, Speex and FLAC come to life!

Vorbis and Theora are used extensively by free software projects, artists and a growing number of music and video distributors.

The Xiph.Org Foundation has criticized Microsoft and the RIAA for their lack of openness. They state that if companies like Microsoft owned patents on the internet then other companies would try to compete, and "The Net, as designed by warring corporate entities, would be a battleground of incompatible and expensive

'standards' had it actually survived at all." They also condemn the RIAA for their support of projects such as Secure Digital Music Initiative.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one (at the moment) that is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has adopted the FLAC format for the distribution of high quality audio over its Euroradio network.

The following formats are supported by Winamp :

MP3,AAC,OGG,

MP4,WMA,WAV

Winamp now has a codec download to play FLAC:

Winamp 2 FLAC Codec.

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