Software Alternatives & Reviews

FLAC VS Vorbis

Compare FLAC VS Vorbis and see what are their differences

FLAC logo FLAC

A free, open source codec for lossless audio compression and decompression

Vorbis logo Vorbis

Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality...
  • FLAC Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-02
  • Vorbis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-11

FLAC videos

Can we hear the differences between MP3 and FLAC?

More videos:

  • Review - FLAC vs Spotify vs YouTube : HEARING Test Review!
  • Review - High Fidelity (Hi-Fi) Music on your Smartphone | FLAC | Vox | Google Play Music

Vorbis videos

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to FLAC and Vorbis)
Audio Player
67 67%
33% 33
Video
59 59%
41% 41
Media Player
60 60%
40% 40
Audio & Music
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, FLAC should be more popular than Vorbis. It has been mentiond 6 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

FLAC mentions (6)

  • Best iPod for music in 2023 with large capacity.
    The Xiph.org foundation maintains FLAC and they have a list of tools that might be helpful. Source: 11 months ago
  • lossless music on the 7th gen
    Lastly, ALAC hasn't been updated by apple since 2016. FLAC is actively maintained by xiph.org and saw its last update this past October. Source: about 1 year ago
  • [Audio] The MQA Controversy: How an inferior format tried to take over the high-end audio market and caused major backlash
    Excessive licensing costs weren’t the only concern surrounding MQA though. MQA is touted as being DRM free, with audio streams able to be stored in the very popular, open source FLAC format. Only the lower resolution 16-bit audio is truly DRM free however. MQA’s authentication watermarking must be present in the file, and properly validated at playback, otherwise MQA decoders will refuse to unfold the audio to... Source: over 1 year ago
  • What audio format do you put on your iPods?
    FLAC continues to be actively maintained and updated. Which, actually thanks for asking your question because in checking sources I noticed FLAC was just updated not two weeks ago. I thik the last time I updated my encoder libraries was after MP3 lost patent protection and dropped licensing a few years ago, so this is fortuitous timing! Anyways, FLAC continues to be meaningfully updated (homepage @ xiph and the... Source: over 1 year ago
  • ELI5: How does audio compression (mp3, etc) make sound files so much smaller?
    There are lossless audio compression standards such as FLAC. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

Vorbis mentions (3)

  • Reverse-engineering a weird video file
    An audio stream encoded as Vorbis, at 48000 samples per second, in stereo audio. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Maximum bitrate of ogg/vorbis
    I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but I've seen ogg/vorbis bitrates in excess of 128 kbps mentioned in several places (supposedly Spotify can stream vorbis at a maximum of 320 kbps), while the xiph.org foundation states that the maximum bitrate per channel is 128 kbps. Assuming that for typical stereo audio this comes to 256 kbps, what is the meaningful comparison with something like e.g. Mp3 at 320 kbps?... Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Loading Audio in Node JS
    But what about audio file formats like mp3, ogg, and flac? The difference between these formats and wav is that the audio is compressed on disk. Mp3 and ogg are what's called "lossy" compression - that means they change the actual sound in ways that are hopefully imperceptible to most listeners in order to get better compression. flac, meanwhile, is a format that implements lossless compression. This means that it... - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing FLAC and Vorbis, you can also consider the following products

WavPack - WavPack is a completely open audio compression format providing lossless, high-quality lossy, and a...

Opus Interactive Audio Codec - Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec.

LAME - LAME is a high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder licensed under the LGPL.

Matroska - The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can...

LameXP - LameXP is an Audio Encoder Front-End, a graphical user-interface for a number of audio encoders.

Monkey's Audio (.APE) - Monkey’s Audio makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music, exactly the same as the original. You can decompress your lossless .APE files back to the original files. Think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ to perfectly recreate the original music CD.