Free Lossless Audio Codec
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Xiph.Org Foundation, Josh Coalson, Erik de Castro Lopo |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 20 July 2001 |
| Stable release |
1.3.2 / 1 January 2017
|
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Codec |
| License | Command-line tools: GNU GPL Libraries: BSD |
| Website | xiph |
| Filename extension | .flac |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | audio/x-flac |
| Magic number | fLaC |
| Type of format | Audio |
| Standard | xiph |
| Open format? | Yes |
FLAC (/ˈflæk/; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, and is also the name of the reference codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to 50–60% of its original size and decompress to an identical copy of the original audio data.
FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC has support for metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking.
Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson. The bit-stream format was frozen when FLAC entered beta stage with the release of version 0.5 of the reference implementation on 15 January 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001.
On 29 January 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph.org banner. Xiph.org is behind other free compression formats such as Vorbis, Theora, Speex and Opus.
Version 1.3.0 was released on 26 May 2013, at which point development was moved to the Xiph.org git repository.
The FLAC project consists of:
The specification of the stream format can be implemented by anyone without prior permission (Xiph.org reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding or decoding methods are covered by any patent. The reference implementation is free software. The source code for libFLAC and libFLAC++ is available under the BSD license, and the sources for flac, metaflac, and the plugins are available under the GNU General Public License.
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