Questions about FLAC Audio
 

What is it exactly, CD Quality Audio?
Do I have to convert it before burning it to an Audio CD?
If so, how, and with what do I convert it?

FLAC takes in the PCM data of a wav file (which is exactly the same as the music data in an Audio CD, only it's contained differently), and compresses it as much as possible. This is true for all proper lossless codecs
With any burner that supports FLAC files, you should be able to convert it to an audio CD without hassle.
Get a FLAC plugin for Nero and see if you can burn the files a an Audio CD.

Simply put Flac is just one of the 'Lossless' compression methods out there meaning that you can re-encode into ANY format with the exact same results as encoding from the original.

While some think it's stupid to use, I made the move to FLAC so re-encoding to some other format won't matter if and when I need to. Hell, I am using it so I won't have to use the CD themselves at all and can archive them forever... ;)

It beats transcoding any day of the week. But I tend to opt for Monkey's Audio for all my lossless needs. All the programs I use that support FLAC also suuport MA, which compresses better than FLAC most of the time.

Incidentally, APE can also take a great deal more processor time to play back. Additionally, I've found APE works for all of crap on Linux most of the time (not sure about OSX), so you may want to avoid it if you're distributing to people you think may be using that OS. ;)

This one's at Sabbey--when and if you ever convert something into a lossy format, what do you use? Just curious.

By the "APE on Linux" comment I'm referring to testing a few boxes. Of the five I've tried, only one played an APE.

On my 700MHz Athlon, all but Extra High and Insane take more than 1-5% of my CPU usage which is fine. The only problem is MA is closed source, if it went open, Linux ports would pour in. If it does eventually disappear into obscurity, no matter I'll convert all of them to FLAC (or whatever is the best lossless format), it not like I'll lose anything (well RIFF chunks will be scrapped, but I don't use those anyways).

Isn't this thread more suited for "Behind the Music"?

I was told that wavpack was superior to flac in multiple ways. There's a comparison on Hydrogen Audio's wiki. One of the features of wavpack is that it supports a theoretically infinite number of audio channels, whereas FLAC is limited. Somehow it gained hardware support; dunno how that happened.

Well, I use LAME VBR MP3s (-V 0) on my portable player. But, that's about it...

Mostly, I don't encode in lossy unless it's by request! :)

My AMD Athlon64 3200+ can read APE (in High compression) at around 30x speed, while it can do FLAC (level 8) at over 100x speed.
It really matters when you have to decompress a whole CDs worth to WAV for burning you know.

Only 30x? My PC can pull 11x and it's about three times slower than yours. Reading thorugh it isn't so bad. Replaygaining an album takes at most five minutes for me.