FLAC 1.0.3 is out. This release includes a decoder speedup, 24-bit input support, more robust plugins, a new metadata block for Vorbis-style tags, a vastly improved metadata editor, and for developers, a new C++ object wrapper library around libFLAC, among other things. For a complete list see here.

Also note that PhatNoise now officially supports FLAC in both the PhatBox/Kenwood Music Keg firmware and the PhatNoise Music Manager software; see the announcement here for more info.

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, a library of reference encoders and decoders, and a metadata interface
• libFLAC++, an object wrapper around libFLAC
• 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 sources for libFLAC and libFLAC++ are 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, BeOS, 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.