Somehow, without me being consciously aware of it, every device in the house that I use to play music has become capable of playing FLAC.

(FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio CoDec. A CoDec is a compressor/decompressor, a method of potentially squeezing lots of data into less data. Lossless means that the bits you put in one side are exactly the bits that you get out the other side after you decompress them. MP3 and most other music and video formats are lossy – the bits that you get out are an approximation of the bits that you put in …