FLAC 1.0 is out! It's been a long time coming but it's finally here. Thanks to everyone who made it possible. FLAC is now clearly the strongest open source lossless audio codec and will continue to improve through the work of the open-source community.

The differences since 0.10 are mostly bug fixes but there is a new feature for aligning encoded files on sector boundaries. The complete list of changes is here.

FLAC 1.0 has been through a huge amount of testing now, including tens-of-thousands of unit and regression tests, and thousands of real-life CD audio tracks. However, if you're paranoid like me you can keep using the verify option (-V) when archiving.

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.

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 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