About:
FLAC is a Free Lossless Audio Codec. The FLAC format supports streaming, seeking, and archival, and gives 25-75% compression on typical CD audio. Input plugins for Winamp and XMMS are also provided.

Author:
Josh Coalson [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.59/10.00 (13 votes)

Homepage:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
Tar/GZ:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13478
Changelog:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/changelog.html#flac_1_1_1
CVS tree (cvsweb):
http://flac.cvs.sourceforge.net/
Mailing list archive:
http://www.xiph.org/archives/

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Environment]		Console (Text Based), Plugins
[Intended Audience]		End Users/Desktop
[License]		OSI Approved :: BSD License (revised), OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL), OSI Approved :: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
[Operating System]		OS Independent
[Programming Language]		Assembly, C
[Topic]		Multimedia :: Sound/Audio, Multimedia :: Sound/Audio :: CD Audio, Multimedia :: Sound/Audio :: Conversion, Multimedia :: Sound/Audio :: Players, System :: Archiving :: Compression

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	1.1.1	01-Oct-2004	BSD License (revised)

 Releases

Version	Focus	Date
1.1.1	Major feature enhancements	01-Oct-2004 04:39
1.1.0	Major feature enhancements	26-Jan-2003 11:29
1.0.4	Major feature enhancements	25-Sep-2002 21:35
1.0.3	Major feature enhancements	04-Jul-2002 11:13
1.0.2	Minor bugfixes	15-Dec-2001 09:20
1.0.1	Minor feature enhancements	19-Nov-2001 21:04
1.0	Minor bugfixes	22-Jul-2001 20:11
0.10	Major feature enhancements	07-Jun-2001 11:32
0.9	Minor bugfixes	02-Apr-2001 22:32
0.8	Major bugfixes	07-Mar-2001 11:29

 Articles referencing this project

• Debian: New flac packages fix arbitrary code execution
  by Patrick Lenz , in Security
  Sun, Jan 20th 2008 16:10
  
• Red Hat: An updated flac package corrects a security issue
  by Patrick Lenz , in Security
  Sun, Oct 28th 2007 07:42
  

 Comments

[»] why to use FLAC ...
by Thomas M. - May 11th 2005 04:39:14

This is from the FLAC faq and pretty nicely sums up why you should use FLAC when you want lossless compression:

Why use FLAC instead of other codecs that compress more?
For most users, a small difference in filesize is usually far outweighed by FLAC's advantages: open patent free codec, portable open source (BSD) reference implementation, documented API, multi-platform support, hardware support, multi-channel support, etc. Improving FLAC to get a little more compression is not worth making it more complex and more compute-intensive to decode, and hence, less likely to be supported in hardware.

If you want really high compresssion (not lossless) check out Ogg Vorbis. Tom

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