<P>FLAC 1.0.2 is out. The bug that was causing some of the plugins to crash sporadically has been fixed. That is all. See <AHREF="news.html#20011203">here</A> for details.</P>
<P>If you use FLAC and have suggestions or patches, please <AHREF="http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=13478">join the mailing list</A> or <AHREF="http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=13478">developers group</A>. Bugs can be filed <AHREF="http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?func=addbug&group_id=13478">here</A>.</P>
<LI>input plugins for various music players (Winamp, XMMS, and more in the works)</LI>
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</P>
<P>
"Free" means that the specification of the stream format is in the public domain (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any patent. It also means that the source for libFLAC is available under the <AHREF="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.html">LGPL</A> and the sources for flac and the plugins are available under the <AHREF="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html">GPL</A>.
FLAC compiles on many platforms: most Unixes (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X), Windows, and OS/2. There are build systems for autoconf/automake, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.
See the <AHREF="features.html">features page</A>, <AHREF="documentation.html">documentation page</A>, or <AHREF="format.html">FLAC format page</A> for more info, the <AHREF="comparison.html">comparison page</A> to see how the reference encoder measures up, or the <AHREF="goals.html">goals page</A> for what the FLAC project hopes to achieve.
Visit the <AHREF="download.html">download page</A> for links to the source code or pre-built binaries, or go directly to the <AHREF="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/flac/">source</A> on SourceForge.
The documentation is available online as well as in the distributions. The general installation and usage documentation for flac and the plugins is <AHREF="documentation.html">here</A>. For a detailed description of the FLAC format and reference encoder see the <AHREF="format.html">FLAC format page</A>.
If you have an application that uses FLAC and would like it to be able to tag .flac files with custom metadata, visit the <AHREF="id.html">registration page</A> to register an ID for your application.
I developed FLAC because no audio compression format I could find did everything I needed. Since I couldn't mash them all together (most are closed-source), I solidified all my requirements (now the FLAC <AHREF="goals.html">goals</A>) and wrote the first implementation. I intended to open-source it from the beginning for two reasons: 1) so that people who knew more about audio compression than me could help improve it; and 2) I wanted to give something back to the OS community, whose huge body of work I rely on so much.
So I started the FLAC project on SourceForge as soon as I had a relatively complete first implementation. Now I'm the maintainer of the FLAC project. You can get in touch with me about it through the <AHREF="http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=13478">mailing list</A> or <AHREF="mailto:jcoalson@users.sourceforge.net">directly</A>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="news.html#20010720">20-Jul-2001</A> :<BR> FLAC 1.0 is here!<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="news.html#20010128">28-Jan-2001</A> :<BR> FLAC gets FASTER for version 0.6<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="news.html#20010115">15-Jan-2001</A> :<BR> FLAC goes beta with version 0.5<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="news.html#20001210">10-Dec-2000</A> :<BR> FLAC <AHREF="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/flac/">debuts</A> on SourceForge<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/misc/abcde-flac.tar.gz">Patch</A> for <AHREF="http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/">abcde</A> (A Better CD Encoder)<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://www.baudline.com/">Baudline</A> signal analyzer<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://www.gstreamer.net/">GStreamer</A> streaming media framework<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://www.icculus.org/SDL_sound/">SDL_sound</A> audio add-on to SDL<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://shnutils.etree.org/shntool/modules/format_flac.c">Patch</A> for <AHREF="http://shnutils.etree.org/shntool/">shntool</A> (<AHREF="http://shnutils.etree.org/shntool/modules/flac-README">README</A>)<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://www.lammerts.org/software/soepkiptng/">Soepkip TNG</A> music playing daemon + web interface<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://www.cyclooctane.com/sonice/">sonice</A> FLAC to Vorbis transcoder<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
<TR><TDBGCOLOR="#EEEED4"><SMALL><FONTFACE="Lucida,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><AHREF="http://smurf.sourceforge.net/">Smurf</A> Sound Font Editor<BR></FONT></SMALL></TD></TR>
