FLAC is currently in the beta stage. As of version 0.5, the format has been frozen. The tools may already be archival quality but I want to do some more testing before an official release. Always use the verify option (-V) when encoding before deleting your originals. Also note the new MD5 signature feature in the stream header and the new test mode (see the documentation page).

If you use FLAC and have suggestions or bugs, please join the mailing list or developers group and help us move to an official 1.0 version.

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

• the stream format
• libFLAC, which implements a reference encoder, stream decoder, and file decoder
• flac, which is 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.

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.

I came up with 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