FLAC
Lossless compression for people who check spectrograms.
Where it came from
Josh Coalson started FLAC in 2000; Xiph.Org adopted it in 2003. While MP3/Ogg Vorbis chased smallness, FLAC answered a different question: can we compress audio without losing a single bit? The answer, at ~50–60% of original size, made it the archive format for musicians, archivists and audiophiles.
How it works
FLAC exploits redundancy: neighboring samples correlate, so a linear predictor estimates the next sample and only the (small) residual gets entropy-coded with Rice coding. Decoding reproduces the original PCM bit-for-bit — verifiable via embedded MD5.
Being lossless and patent-free, it's the natural 'master copy' format: convert FLAC to anything, keep the original forever.
UWC decodes FLAC through Web Audio and encodes it back via @audio/encode — entirely in your browser.
Convert FLAC audio
FLAC to MP3/Opus for devices, FLAC to WAV for editors — local conversion, bit-exact sources respected.