FLAC

FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec, is another open source audio codec, but unlike MP3, Vorbis or others, it’s lossless compression. This means that you can rip the audio CD without loosing any data or quality whatsoever.

To explain lossless, just take the example of wizip. When you zip files up in wizip it decreases the size and saves space but when you unzip them everything is back to normal shape and usability without any loss. Similarly, when you use lossless codecs such as FLAC, none of the digital data is lost –It’s like zipping a CD audio file and then unzipping it during playback.

FLAC can be found at sourceforge and can be used to compress audio, and used with the ogg container to give Ogg FLAC –or FLAC encoded Ogg files.

Advantage:
-Its quite fast, both when encoding or decoding
-Its natively seekable and streamable (so you don’t really need containers like Ogg unless you have to play it in your ogg enabled or ogg supporting portable music player)
Overall, FLAC is good for audiophiles who want CD-quality data on the go.