Getting a Bit of FLAC

A few episodes of DL.tv ago, Robert Heron mentioned that he was re-ripping his CD collection into FLAC. I thought "big deal", until he mentioned that it's a lossless format. The name sounded familiar, so I looked it up.

FLAC is an open-source, lossless audio format. It's unique in that it uses compression to save files at a size only half that of other lossless formats, yet supports random access and streaming. That sounded good, so I tried it.
The sound quality is awesome. I did a simple A/B comparison after exporting raw song data to both MP3 and FLAC, and the FLAC file has a much cleaner sound to it. I would have never noticed the MP3 compression artifacts without the comparison, but they're definitely there.
The FLAC file is also about half the size of the source WAV, as advertised.

Now for the downsides: while the FLAC file does only take up about half the space of a WAV file, the MP3 file takes up a tenth. (WAV: ~35MB, FLAC: ~19MB, MP3: ~3.2MB) Basically that just means you won't see too many lossless portable players out there*. However, FLAC looks like an excellent format for media backup, since there will likely be a whole slew of conversion utilities available for every new format that comes along. No need to re-rip, just re-convert. (And that can be automated far more easily!)
The major downside is that you need to know a little bit about what you're doing to use the conversion software. I'm sure it's a vast improvement over earlier versions, but the frontend is not exactly the pinnacle of UI design. They did use tooltips effectively, though, so as long as you hover your mouse over a buttom before you click, there shouldn't be too much guesswork.
My main problem with the interface is not being able to adjust the volume prior to encoding. Not having an easy way to modify the file metadata is coming in as a close second, but I could probably write my own tool to do that. If I could automate volume normalization and eliminate the metadata problem, things would be perfect. Aside from those problems, though, I really like the format so far.

Grade: A

* There are some portable players that supprt FLAC, just not too many.