Fourier Analogue-in-Digital is an uncompressed codec like WAV or AIFF rather than FLAC or ALAC. Unlike WAV or AIFF, which store PCM, FrAD stores energy density per frequency.

FrAD is a codec that nobody owns, nobody patents, and is standardised in so much detail that anyone can easily implement it in any language, even if the original implementation is lost. It also supports tags, cover art, and sequential search, and the original implementation can be supported by any OS on any machine that supports Python.

The main difference between any other formats and FrAD is its resilience to corruption and robustness. For many audio files that are branched fron PCM, even a flip of a bit or two can result in popping noise, failure to play the corrupted frame, or even the loss of all subsequent audio information. FrAD, however, provides robust error recovery such that sporadic flipping of a few bytes is not even a concern.

Goals of FrAD (more)

• Preserving analogue waveforms intact in digital file.
• Ensuring the analogue waveform remains intact even if the file is corrupted
• Making all data frames work independently