The FLAC reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

FLAC

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC is an audio compression codec that is lossless. FLAC is often compared to MP3, though MP3 is a lossy codec. The FLAC project consists of:

• the stream format
• libFLAC, a library of reference encoders and decoders, and a metadata interface
• libFLAC++, an object wrapper around libFLAC
• flac, a command-line wrapper around libFLAC to encode and decode .flac files
• metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for .flac files
• input plugins for various music players (Winamp, XMMS, and more in the works)

"Free" means that the specification of the stream format is in the public domain (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 patent. It also means that the sources for libFLAC and libFLAC++ are available under Xiph.org's BSD license and the sources for flac, metaflac, and the plugins are available under the GPL.

FLAC compiles on many platforms: most Unices (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X), Windows, BeOS, and OS/2. There are build systems for autoconf/automake, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.

On January 29th, 2003, Xiphophorus (now called the Xiph.org Foundation) announced the incorporation of FLAC under their xiph.org banner, to go along with Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and Speex.

See also Lossless data compression, Lossy data compression, Audio data compression

External link:

• Project homepage
• Unofficial FLAC installer

This is the "FLAC" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.