FLAC 1.1.0 is out. New features include ReplayGain and cue sheet support, improved 24-bit compression, and tag editing in the plugins. See here for the full list.

Note that the minor version has incremented, meaning forward compatibility was broken (forward compatibility means an earlier decoder can play all streams made by a later decoder). This is only because of a bug in 1.0.4 and prior where the decoder could not properly skip unknown metadata. The stream format itself has not changed and FLAC is still fully backward-compatible. All it means is that a FLAC file containing cue sheet metadata will not decode in older decoders. This bug is fixed in 1.1.0.

Attention AudioTron users: Bery Rinaldo has released his Samba File Extension Mapping VFS Module that allows FLAC files to be played on the AudioTron.

If you use FLAC and have suggestions or patches, please join the mailing list. Bugs can be filed here, but make sure to check the known bugs section first.

last updated 2003-Jan-26

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless. 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

"Free" means 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.

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, or the comparison page to see how FLAC compares with other lossless codecs.

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.