FLAC is an open source project and we are happy to enlist the help of anyone who wants to contribute. The preferred method for transmitting improvements is patch files (in "diff -c" format) sent to the developer mailing list, but zipped up sources are OK. Make sure to read the FLAC goals first; there are some thing the we don't want added to FLAC, like copy protection and lossy compression.

High priority items are:

• Support in the plugins for using the CUESHEET metadata block. The plugin should be able to see a CUESHEET in a FLAC file and present the individual tracks in the player, and fetch metadata from CDDB or CDindex by computing the hash from the CUESHEET and looking up either in a local database or over the net.

Some other "nice-to-haves":

• FLAC module for Audiofile.
• JMF plugin.
• Streaming support in the plugins.

FLAC is open to third-party developers who want to add support for FLAC into their programs. All the necessary functionality is contained the libraries libFLAC or libFLAC++ which are licensed under Xiph.Org's BSD license. The relevant documentation here is:

• The libFLAC and libFLAC++ API documentation
• The formal description of the FLAC format.
• The ID registration page for registering an ID if you need to write custom metadata.

There also are several examples in the FLAC code base of the use of libFLAC and libFLAC++ that may also be helpful. Visit the download page for instructions on how to get the source.