Hi-

I am setting up a linux music server in my house and I want to be able to serve files via slimserver to several laptops throughout the house. The laptops would have an external usb sound card that connected to an adjacent stereo. The laptops would use a slimserver client, or winamp or similar.

My question is if a lot of my music library is in FLAC format, does the external soundcard matter, or are they all generally capable of dealing with FLAC.

Thanks

-Elio

FLAC is just an audio compression format and has to be handled by the software playing it (for example Winamp).

For your soundcard it is important how data is delivered to it. PCM 16bit 44.1kHz for example. If you have 24bit 96kHz FLACs and your soundcard does 16bit 48kHz max, then the data has to be converted to a suitable format. Your player or the soundcard (or it's driver) can take care of that for you.