FLAC
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)
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Identification
When FLAC is used as a file format, it begins with the ASCII signature "fLaC".
In rare cases, this signature may appear following an ID3v2 segment; see ID3#Identification.
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)
FLAC is also natively supported by Mozilla's Firefox browser, starting from Firefox 51. For more software products which support FLAC, see the FLAC links page
Specifications
Sample files
- https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/audio/flac/
- http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/flac/ (some are in .ogg format (OggFlac format))
