I was also not enamored of the .flac format in which the vendors delivered their downloads. While called a “lossless” way to reduce file size, making for convenient, faster download times, the results were not so lossless according to everyone participating in the comparison tests we ran in my studio.
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Fans of the so-called “lossless” formats compare them to zipping a word processor file. Yes, the zipped words come back intact, even though I can’t say I find the same to be true of flac’d music.
So what about zipped music? We’ve used zipped music files before, such as those on the
Format Comparison page of the
Soundkeeper Recordings website. And when unzipped, no one who participated in our tests could differentiate between the source file and the copy that had been zipped.