Jayant jee
This is the home page of FLAC:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/ (most of your questions are answered here)
Ans to Q#1FLAC is another technique for compressing audio files -
but not like mp3. Without going into too much detail, let me say this:
mp3 is a lossy algorithm in which not only redundancy is thrown away but also some signal is thrown away which is considered imperceptible or indistinguishable to human ears.
FLAC is like your winrar or winzip in which compression is completely lossless - imagine if your bank account details in a word file were compressed in a lossy way - uncompressing it would probably throw away your deposits - not something that you'd want.
But you can afford to do the same with music, a cymbal here or a drum there in transition missing is n't that big a deal especially if you were not going to be hear it all that well unless of course you happened to be a frequency spectrum analyzer. mp3 takes advantage of the same.
So, for all practical purposes, mp3 at high bit rates are good enough - to me, at least. But as these days photography hobbysts want the ability to save their photos in raw format, some audiophiles or archivers want the ability to keep their music in lossless format and FLAC is one choice for that.
Ans to Q#2The installer is for windows so it should work on all windows OS - including xp. Usually if the software is meant for only a particular verison, then they'd say so otherwise you can safely assume that they are for all versions of windows.
on the same page, read in Extra section:
GUI encoding/decoding front-ends:
Windows
dBpowerAMP, a swiss army knife that can convert and play many formats, including FLAC.
More: Go here for a compariosn of various lossless algos:
http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htmPhew! that was long. HTH.
anurag
PS: May be this should be copied/moved to Technology section.