FLAC

Revision as of 15:23, 2 June 2016

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 .flac), 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)

Playback

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)

For more software products which support FLAC, see the FLAC links page

Specifications

• FLAC Format Specification

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