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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: High Quality Music Server / CD player
Post Subject: Flac is just a contender.Posted by xandcg on: 3/11/2017
I am not surprised this kind of bizarre affirmation coming from a guy whom aim to live of royalties from copyrighted material.
WAV or WAVE (aka Audio for Windows) is owned by Microsoft and IBM, and AIFF is owned by Apple Inc.
I do not know the current legal state of WAV, but if you want to commercialize AIFF audio files you shall pay royalties for Apple. And you probably will only really know how it works (if it do modify or not the data) if you do some agreement with Apple.
Flac is open source (GNU GPL) a kind of license called copyleft. What basically means you pay nothing to distribute Flac material, and depending on what you (he) do code-wise with it this code also became GNU GPL automatically...
Flac is not indeed a "file format", it is just a contender. If you use compression (yes, you can do it without using compression), a md5 hash will be taken from the original data -> it will be inserted into the Flac contender. When you play it, it will be uncompressed -> a md5 hash will be taken again, but now from the uncompressed data -> the md5 hashes (of original file and the uncompressed one) will be compared -> if everything match the file will play, otherwise it is marked as corrupt.
There is no difference between the original PCM data and the uncompressed one (not even a single bit) unless it was made by some weird custom software/algorithm instead of the Flac one. It is indeed more easily to have the file damaged during a download from the internet (or while you copy it from one storage device to another) than on the Flac compress/decompress activity, because most internet downloads (and copy tools) do not hash the data and compare them later.
If you really want to make a test, get any raw PCM data (or any other data) -> create a md5/sha256/sha512 hash of it (store/write the result) -> compress to Flac (or even 7z, what is the most aggressive compression algorithm commonly available) -> decompress -> do the hash again, but now against the uncompressed data -> compare the result of both hashes.
Cheers!
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