FLAC
FLAC is a Free Lossless Audio Codec. The FLAC format supports streaming, seeking, and archival, and gives 25-75% compression on typical CD audio. Input plugins for Winamp and XMMS are also provided.
| Tags | multimedia Sound/Audio CD Audio Conversion Archiving Compression |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL LGPL |
| Operating Systems | OS Independent |
| Implementation | C Assembly |
Recent releases
- 01 Oct 2004 04:39
Release Notes: This release includes improved Ogg FLAC support, decoding speedups on PowerPC, several new options to flac and metaflac, and many small improvements and bugfixes.
- 26 Jan 2003 11:29
Release Notes: This release adds ReplayGain and cue sheet support, and improves 24-bit compression, tag editing in the plugins, and decoding to AIFF.
- 25 Sep 2002 21:35
Release Notes: This release has support for Vorbis comments, ID3v1 and v2 tags, and 24-bit playback in the plugins. There is UTF-8 support for Vorbis comments in metaflac, reduced memory requirements, an encoder speedup, a new --tag option for adding Vorbis comments while encoding, and AIFF input support in flac.
- 04 Jul 2002 11:13
Release Notes: This release includes a 10-15% decoder speedup, 24-bit input support, more robust plugins, a new metadata block for Vorbis-style tags, a vastly improved metadata editor, a new C++ object wrapper library around libFLAC, a new metadata interface, and more.
- 15 Dec 2001 09:20
Release Notes: This version fixes a bug that was causing some plugins to crash.
Recent comments
why to use FLAC ...
This is from the FLAC faq and pretty nicely sums up why you should use FLAC when you want lossless compression:
Why use FLAC instead of other codecs that compress more?
For most users, a small difference in filesize is usually far outweighed by FLAC's advantages: open patent free codec, portable open source (BSD) reference implementation, documented API, multi-platform support, hardware support, multi-channel support, etc. Improving FLAC to get a little more compression is not worth making it more complex and more compute-intensive to decode, and hence, less likely to be supported in hardware.
If you want really high compresssion (not lossless) check out Ogg Vorbis. Tom (http://www.very-clever.com/)
jcoalson
18 Dec 2000 16:00
