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Free Lossless Audio Codec
Sign in to saveAlso known as FLAC audio, FLAC format, FLAC lossless compressed audio, .flac, FLAC
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.
Key facts
- Software.name
- Free Lossless Audio Codec
- Software.logo
- FLAC logo vector.svg
- Software.developer
- Xiph.Org Foundation, Josh Coalson, Erik de Castro Lopo
- Software.operating_system
- Cross-platform
- Software.programming language
- C, C++
- Software.genre
- Codec
- Software.license
- Command-line tools: GNU GPLLibraries: BSD
- File format.name
- Free Lossless Audio Codec
- File format.extension
- .flac
- File format.mime
- audio/flac
- File format.uniform type
- org.xiph.flac
- File format.magic
- fLaC
- File format.type
- Lossless audio
- File format.open
- Yes
- File format.free
- Yes
via Wikipedia infobox
~10 min read
Encyclopedic overview
14 sectionsContents
- History
- Design
- File structure
- Encoding and decoding
- Compression
- Implementation
- Comparison to other formats
- Adoption and implementations
- Reference implementation
- Hardware and software
- Use in archives
- See also
- References
- External links
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses 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 supports metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Free Lossless Audio Codec” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.