FLAC

2012-11-10T04:16:02Z

Carl: Added MediaMonkey player

{|
|[[File Formats]]
| >
|[[Electronic File Formats]]
| >
|[[Audio]]
| >
|[[FLAC]]
|}

== Description ==

FLAC is a file format and codec for losslessly compressed audio. It can store audio with a PCM bit resolution up to 32 bits per sample and sampling rates up to 640 kHz.

The format is open and royalty-free. The reference implementation is cross-platform and dual-licensed, command-line utilities (e.g. encoder, decoder and metadata editor) use GNU GPL and code libraries use BSD.

FLAC is suitable for archiving for many reasons:
* open format
* support for metadata tagging
* lossless (no generation loss if you need to convert to another format)
* disk size effective (audio is typically reduced to 50-60% of original size)
* data integrity
* error resistant (bit faults are contained within a frame, typically a fraction of a second)

== Playback ==
=== Hardware ===
* Squeezebox
* Transporter
* Sonos

=== Software ===
* Amarok - cross-platform, open source
* foobar2000 - Windows, non-commercial
* VLC - cross-platform, open source
* Winamp - Windows, commercial
* MediaMonkey - Windows, commercial

== Links ==
* [http://flac.sourceforge.net/ Home of FLAC project]
* [http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html FLAC format description]

DBase III

2012-11-10T04:12:29Z

Carl: Added links to dBase file structure sites

{{FormatInfo
| name = dBase Database File
| extensions = *.dbf
| pronom = x-fmt/9
}}

This article describes how to export data out of a dBase III Table File (*.dbf).

=== Opening the data with Libre Office ===
It is possible to import *.dbf files into Libre Office (or Open Office) Calc or Base: http://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Importing_and_Exporting_dBASE_Files .

Libre Office will try to recognize the character encoding of the data and preselect this option in the import window. Once a file imported, it can be saved in/exported to a variety of different formats.

=== Importing the data directly into a mySQL database ===
Alternatively the data can directly be imported into a running mySQL database using the linux program <code>[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man1/dbf2mysql.1.html dbf2mysql]</code>. Importing the data directly however could cause some problems with the character encoding for non ASCII characters.

If the mysql server is already running, the following commands will import the data:
user@linux:~$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> create database database_name;
mysql> exit
user@linux:~$ sudo apt-get install dbf2mysql
user@linux:~$ dbf2mysql -vvv -c -f -d database_name -U root -P password DATA_FILE.DBF

The data can then be exported using <code>mysqldump</code>
user@linux:~$ mysqldump -u root -p database_name > data_export.sql

=== Additional Weblinks ===
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase Wikipedia article about dBase]
* [http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/x-fmt/9 dBase III entry in PRONOM]
* [http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000325.shtml dBase entry at digitalpreservation.gov]
* [http://www.dbf2002.com/dbf-file-format.html DBF File structure]
* [http://www.dbase.com/Knowledgebase/INT/db7_file_fmt.htm dBase File Structure at dBase knowledge base]

Just Solve the File Format Problem - User contributions [en]

FLAC

DBase III