FLAC is a streaming format. Each block of audio is compressed independently of the rest of the file. Comparing it to any archival compression algorithm (PNG u

FLAC is a streaming format. Each block of audio is compressed independently of the rest of the file. Comparing it to any archival compression algorithm (PNG uses DEFLATE with some pre-filtering) is not an apples to apples comparison. The utility of a streaming format is that, (a) your listeners can start the stream at any offset without having the preceding blocks, (b) the CPU overhead is generally stable and (c) decoding requires a minimal amount of memory and IO.