Sunday, September 13, 2015

Forget PONO Play get Windows 10 Tablet/Phone and play FLAC audio

Open up your world to the entertainment of playing FLAC files for free on any Windows 10 device.





A little talked about feature and with the release Windows 10 audiophiles, music enthusiasts and music lovers just got a great jolt in the arm with Windows 10.


A FLAC file is a file which contains audio compressed with the FLAC audio encoding algorithm. FLAC is very good because is is a lossless audio codec and reduces files size from 50-60%. Lossless means the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data, not like MP3 which is sampled and missing data to reduce file size.

Historically, FLAC is not widely supported by hardware vendors, so it can happen that your Audio (MP3) player won't play FLAC files, because they are generally larger files. With storage prices coming down this is less of the issue, but the music industry is supprising reluctant to change. 

Open source is important so that this codec will improve and keep the costs down on new players/phones on the market. Hey you Android nuts, now you can manage and sync those FLAC files.

Hence, the PONO player, but who wants to bonoed for $400, you can buy a tablet for that!

Now there's a solution for you wanna-be audiophiles with Windows 10. That means any phones that upgrade to Windows 10 including the Lumia 635, Lumia 730 and Lumia 830 will play FLAC files.

That's right for a free upgrade you can now play FLAC files for free, with a pretty good audio player software. Previously on Windows, you had to use Winamp (winamp.com an empty promise) to rip and play FLAC, but long time lost support and last good now build is Winamp 5.666 Full Build from years back. 

Other players are not need now, Windows Media Player 12 now supports ripping and plays FLAC files natively!!!! About time~ 






































Hurray, a great move by Microsoft. 

Possible issues with importing FLAC Files:
Installing the 
WMP Tag Plus plug-in should add FLAC library and tagging support to WMP. 
http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/index.htm?http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/wmptagplus/