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Freeware - Home and Hobby - Sound Tool Lossless Audio

La is a Lossless Audio compression program. That is, in contrast to formats such as mp3, it reduces the size of music without affecting the quality, as the uncompressed signal is exactly identical to the original. It features a Windows frontend, command-line tool, and plugins for Winamp + foobar2000. LA does work with earlier versions of Windows BUT, the current version requires the .NET framework which is only included in XP. You can either download & install .NET (free but it's a huge 20Megs!) or choose an earlier version of LA.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless. The encoding of PCM data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.