MP3 is an acronym for MPEG-l or MPEG-2 audio layer 3. It is a coding scheme for the compression of an audio signal. It uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information, i.e. it filters out all the information from a song which can't be discerned by the human ear. One alternative to MP3s is FLAC; it stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC is similar to MP3 but lossless, meaning the audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in audio quality.

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It is supported by most of the operating systems including Windows XP. The compression software is free and available for download at. We have also included the Windows XP version in the Tools CD of the May issue. To playback files encoded in FLAC, you need a player that is capable of doing that. Here is the list of devices capable of playing files encoded in FLAC.

• COWON's iAUDIO A2, iAUDIO U3, iAUDIO M3, and iAUDIO X5.

• iPods via the Rockbox firmware replacement.

• iRiver's iHP-120/iHP-140/H320/H340 via the Rockbox firmware replacement.