I have a pretty large collection of FLAC files created from my CD collection. I love the FLAC format and the sound quality that you can get from it.
Lately, however, I've been trying to write a few tools to manipulate the files and I've been noticing what seems to be a stagnation of the community around the codec. Some of the links on the official FLAC page point to things that are no longer relevant. 7digital, for example, appears to no longer sell FLAC encoded songs.
It's pretty hard to find hardware players that support FLAC any more. Most noticeably it's not present on lower end players when it used to be, and playback is absent on Android. Programming language tools (Java and .NET libraries) are at best old, and at worst unfinished.
What's the current state of FLAC development?
Has it been replaced by another codec?
What currently updated applications make use of it?
Answer
I believe flac is still in widespread use, and 7digital does still sell flac albums (for example some albums by Enya, Radiohead, Massive Attack, and Oasis). It seems to me that the RIAA and record labels do not support lossless DRM-free content though (in any format), so finding lossless music to buy online is challenging (or impossible) right now. I partially disagree with Chris above because disk space and bandwidth are growing so quickly we can just use the archival version for our whole music collection. But yeah, unless you have good audio equipment at over 300 bits per second you're generally not going to hear a difference (although I've noticed it in the attack or sound onset of violins).
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