Does Flac Have Flash Support?

[FaeryTaleAdventurer]

FLAC (or, Free Lossless Audio Codec) is something that has recently been on my mind for some time. I've heard about it as a audio filetype for a while but didn't think much about it. For the longest, I've always wondered if it'd be possible that Flash supports would support FLAC, 'cause as a NewGrounder first and a musician 2nd (should that be reversed?/puzzled), I always wondered why (not to say this goes towards ALL Flash works online) the audio, specifically the music, sounds lossy and low-quality.

Until I began noticing filesizes of the uploaded Flash games and videos, I had the notion that Flash simply diminishes the quality of audio. The math didn't seem to add up after seeing a Flash with a multi-Audio Portal submitted library, that definitely seemed like a fraction of the size if the songs were saved their normal audio quality. I could understand why the music/sounds were compressed, as to reduce loading times and such, but I personally find it annoying that after listening to the playback of a song in the Flash, and getting my ears nearly blasted clicking on a link to the original Audio Portal version.

This is where I began to ask myself: Is it possible that there is an audio filetype out there that can retain it's awesome full Audio Portal quality, while not having to be compressed to save disk space/reduce load times (like the eco-friendly light bulbs of today that could emit 60 watts, while only using up like 13 watts in reality)? After some searching across the, uh, internets--the answer appeared to be the open-source, non-proprietary codec, known as FLAC.

I've read that this filetype can retain the normal quality of an .mp3/.wav or similar codec while being 50 to 60 percent smaller than the equivalent. I thought that's a pretty good deal right there. I think if Flash does support FLAC, more Flash artists should use it (unless perhaps their Flash only has like 1 or 2 songs in all), so fans of the audio won't have to adjust their volume or briefly feel strange going from the Flash to the A.P. source. I'm sure this'll be most pleasing for everyone from the Flash artist to the sound/music maker to the viewers/players/listeners.

Even better yet, if the answer is yes, it would be great if NewGrounds either permits both an .mp3 and .flac version of audio submissions, or, have a built-in FLAC converter, that will have those who are especially interested in using the music in an NG Flash able to download a disk-space-conscious-yet-high-quality version!

I understand this is the Audio forum, but there are surely A.P. ppl out here that make their own Flashes as well.

[Chris-V2]

While FLAC is very clever I don't think Flash supports it as it would require Adobe to package the FLAC codec with their system. Not only that but Flash as a program would have to be able to encode FLAC and while decoders are generaly free an encoder is very expensive. Flash probably has its own encoder simple because it was cheaper in the long run.

It is lossy but that level of support is unlikely until HTML 5 takes over from Flash and I doubt the audio codec they will use will be FLAC. Lossless audio systems are good in terms of space but they use up CPU in their stead. Considering how often some Flash gobbles CPU they probably didn't want the burden of implementing an efficent lossless audio codec either.

TL;DR - No, but a good idea more suited to a more perfect world.

[Nav]

FLAC is unnecessary for Audio Portal music. Encoding at V2 sounds very very close (and I guarantee you can't tell V0 apart from FLAC) and doesn't require bitrates of around 600 kb/s to maintain. Remember when you got 4 MB for a song? Yeah, a lot has changed - no need to ask for more space, it's just a waste of server space. Music will be music, and not all of us are willing to download a 50 MB song just to watch a video, especially if running on a cheap 3G plan.

[htmldude]

At 4/23/11 01:24 PM, Nav wrote: especially if running on a cheap 3G plan.

You watch flash movies on 3G? That's like playing Quake over carrier pigeon!

[Nav]

At 4/23/11 07:11 PM, htmldude wrote: You watch flash movies on 3G? That's like playing Quake over carrier pigeon!

Except I don't have immediate access to a carrier pigeon when I'm out and about but have time to burn. It was just an example anyway - I know that even wired connections can be slow, and I see no reason to waste peoples' bandwidth on stuff that doesn't make a difference.