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 here for details.

If you use FLAC and have suggestions or patches, please join the mailing list or developers group. Bugs can be filed here.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless. The FLAC project consists of:

• the stream format
• libFLAC, which implements reference encoders and decoders
• flac, a command-line wrapper around libFLAC to encode and decode .flac files
• input plugins for various music players (Winamp, XMMS, and more in the works)

"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 LGPL and the sources for flac and the plugins are available under the GPL.

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 features page, documentation page, or FLAC format page for more info, the comparison page to see how the reference encoder measures up, or the goals page for what the FLAC project hopes to achieve.

Visit the download page for links to the source code or pre-built binaries, or go directly to the source 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 here. For a detailed description of the FLAC format and reference encoder see the FLAC format page.

If you have an application that uses FLAC and would like it to be able to tag .flac files with custom metadata, visit the registration page 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 goals) 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 mailing list or directly

--Josh Coalson