FLAC

FLAC is a Free Lossless Audio Codec. It can encode audio with a PCM bit resolution up to 32 bits per sample and sampling rates up to 640 kHz. FLAC-encoded audio is usually found either in a native container (which has the extension ), or in an Ogg container (when it's known as OggFLAC).

The format is open and royalty-free. The reference implementation is cross-platform and dual-licensed, command-line utilities (e.g. encoder, decoder and metadata editor) use GNU GPL and code libraries use BSD.

FLAC is suitable for archiving for many reasons:
 * open format
 * support for metadata tagging
 * lossless (no generation loss if you need to convert to another format)
 * disk size effective (audio is typically reduced to 50-60% of original size)
 * data integrity
 * error resistant (bit faults are contained within a frame, typically a fraction of a second)

Identification
When FLAC is used as a file format, it begins with the ASCII signature "".

In rare cases, this signature may appear following an ID3v2 segment; see ID3.

Hardware
Many home stereo and portable hardware music players support the FLAC format. See the FLAC links page for an up-to-date list.

Software
A number of popular audio players support the FLAC format, including:


 * Amarok (cross-platform, open source)
 * foobar2000 (Windows, non-commercial)
 * MediaMonkey (Windows, commercial)
 * Songbird (cross-platform, open source)
 * VLC (cross-platform, open source)
 * Winamp (Windows, commercial)

FLAC is also natively supported by Mozilla's Firefox browser, starting from Firefox 51. For more software products which support FLAC, see the FLAC links page

Specifications

 * FLAC Format Specification

Sample files

 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/audio/flac/

Links

 * Home of FLAC project
 * FLAC format description
 * FLAC FAQ (hey, that rhymes!)
 * Commentary about Audi car not playing high-bitrate FLACs
 * FLAC in the archives
 * Mozilla Firefox supported media formats list
 * Firefox 51: FLAC Audio Codec Support