MP3 players with FLAC

Donald Bell, Senior Editor April 6, 2009

Just like canned beer, MP3s are cheap, convenient, and sold just about everywhere, but the quality doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. If you want to hear every detail in your music--every breath, every strum, every rattle--lossless music formats are the only way to go. There's a handful of lossless file options out there, including Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless, WAV, and APE, but the lossless format getting the most buzz these days is FLAC.

The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an open-source lossless audio format capable of reducing the size of uncompressed audio sources by 40 percent to 50 percent without any degradation in sound quality. You can find free programs for Mac, Windows, and Linux that will play and rip FLAC files, but finding a FLAC-compatible MP3 player isn't quite so easy.

It's possible that you already own a FLAC-compatible audio player and don't realize it. A firmware update is available for folks who purchased earlier versions of the Sansa Fuze and Sansa Clip, which updates the devices with FLAC support and other improvements. If you own an older iPod, the open-source Rockbox firmware offers FLAC audio playback, custom EQ, games, and tons of little surprises.

To see some FLAC gadgets that work well with video, too, check out our list of FLAC-compatible PVPs.

More Resources

FLAC-compatible portable video players,

Editors' top lossless MP3 players