Just in: livephish.com is now offering recordings in FLAC format in addition to MP3.

Neuros: Neuros and Xiph.org are collaborating to bring Vorbis support to Neuros Digital Audio Computers. Now that FLAC is part of Xiph, Neuros is considering FLAC support. You can follow some of the Vorbis and FLAC discussions here and here.

FLAC has joined the Xiph project; see here for the press release.

Xiph.org is behind other free codecs such as Vorbis, Theora, and Speex. Our merger with Xiph will bring FLAC into the ranks and lead to better integration with the Ogg multimedia framework.

Note that the FLAC format is not changing, native FLAC will continue to exist, and the command-line tools and plugins will continue to work as before. The codec libraries will now be available under Xiph's BSD-like license.

last updated 2003-Jun-23

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without throwing away any information. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see links on the main page for supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC is supported on most operating systems, including Windows, "unix" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. There are build systems for autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.

The FLAC project consists of:

• the stream format
• reference encoders and decoders in library form
• flac, a command-line program to encode and decode FLAC files
• metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for FLAC files
• input plugins for various music players

By "Free" we mean that the specification of the stream format is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (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 known patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source licenses.

See the comparison page to see how FLAC compares with other lossless codecs, or the features page, documentation page, or FLAC format page for more info.

Visit the download page for links to the source code or pre-built binaries.

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.