Revision as of 02:21, 18 April 2005

What is FLAC?

Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. "Free" means "Free" - that the specification of the stream format is in the public domain. It also means that the sources for libFLAC and libFLAC++ are available under the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution)

FLAC compiles on many platforms.

Some claim FLAC is the most widely used lossless compression format on UNIX systems (though it seems more likely that shn retains that honor on all OS platforms).

Pros

Portable to many systems
Source open and freely licenced
Hardware support (PhatBox, Kenwood MusicKeg, Rio Karma, etc. See below)
Streaming support
Extremely fast decoding
Supports multichannel and high resolution streams
Supports ReplayGain
Supports cue-sheet (with some limitations)
Gaining wide use as successor to Shorten

Cons

Compresses less efficiently than other popular modern compressors (Monkey's Audio, LPAC, OptimFROG)
Higher compression modes slow, for little gain over the default setting.

Players that support FLAC

For a more complete list see the FLAC links page.

Hardware

Home stereo

AudioReQuest music servers
Digital Techniques' "iStereo" M300A Digital Music Player
Escient's FireBall servers (E2-40/160/300, DVDM-300)
Hifidelio
Meda Systems' Bravo servers
The MS300 Music Server by McIntosh Laboratory
PhatNoise Home Digital Media Player
Rio Reciever and Dell Digital Audio Receiver
SkipJam's networked audio/video devices
Squeezebox2
Zensonic Z500 Networked DVD Media Player

Car stereo

Portable

Software

Players

Apollo
foobar2000
JRiver Media Center
LAMIP
MPlayer
MythTV
QCD (plugin)
VLC
VUPlayer
Winamp
Windows Media Player and other directshow-based players (MPC, TCMP, RadLight) (with Illiminable's directshow filters or CoreFLAC)
Xine
XMMS
XMplay

Frontends (Windows)

Flacattack
Custom Windows Frontend (by Speek)
UniversalFront by Böreck
Frontah by Madah
Mareo by Kwambis

Frontends (Mac)

Converters

dBpowerAMP Music Converter / Audio Player / CD Writer
GX:Transcoder Music converter

Editors

CoolEdit

CD writers/rippers

Ahead Nero Burning Rom
Arson
burnatonce
Burrrn Audio CD burner
Exact Audio Copy CD Ripper
CDex CD ripper
CD Wave

Taggers

Mp3tag Universal Tag Editor
The GodFather Tagger / Music manager
Case's Tag command line tagger

Other tools

Mr. QuestionMan
Audio Identifier
mkvtoolnix - tool to multiplex FLAC streams inside the Matroska container

...and many more; see the FLAC software section and download section for a more comprehensive list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Does the compression level affect decompression speed?

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: In truth, the compression level does affect the decompression speed, but the difference between the various compress levels can barely be measured and is too small to be noticed, even on low-end machines.

Question: What is the best compression level for encoding my music?

Short Answer: The default setting, 5.

Long Answer: Encoding at the default setting will give the best balance between compression and encoding speed. Encoding at 8 can more than quadruple the encoding time, while having an insignificant effect on compression.

Addtional Reading

FLAC Project Webpage
Download
Rio Karma
Speek's Comparison of lossless audio compressors
Lossless Codec Comparison by Rjamorim

@@ Line 56: / Line 56: @@
 * [[JRiver Media Center]]
 * [http://fondriest.frederic.free.fr/realisations/lamip/ LAMIP]
+* [http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ MPlayer]
+* [http://www.mythtv.org/ MythTV]
+* [http://www.quinnware.com/ QCD] ([http://www.quinnware.com/list_plugins.php?type=input plugin])
+* [http://www.videolan.org/ VLC]
 * [http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.htm VUPlayer]
 * [[Winamp]]
 * [[Windows Media Player]] and other directshow-based players (MPC, TCMP, RadLight) (with [http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ Illiminable's directshow filters] or [http://corecodec.org/projects/coreflac CoreFLAC])
+* [http://xine.sourceforge.net/ Xine]
 * [[XMMS]]
+* [http://www.un4seen.com/ XMplay]
-===Frontends===
+===Frontends (Windows) ===
+* [http://www.uninformative.com/flacattack/ Flacattack]
 * Custom [http://members.home.nl/w.speek/flac.htm Windows Frontend] (by Speek)
 * [http://www.unifront.boereck.de/ UniversalFront] by Böreck
 * [http://home.vxu.se/mdati00/frontah/ Frontah] by Madah
 * [http://mareo.monkeydev.org/ Mareo] by Kwambis
+===Frontends (Mac) ===
+* [http://www.danrules.com/macflac/ MacFLAC]
+* [http://members.rogers.com/beamsplitter/ RipBeak]
+* [http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21952 xACT]
 ===Converters===
@@ Line 76: / Line 88: @@
 ===CD writers/rippers===
 * [http://www.ahead.de Ahead Nero Burning Rom]
+* [http://arson.sourceforge.net/ Arson]
+* [http://www.burnatonce.com/ burnatonce]
 * [http://www.burrrn.net Burrrn] Audio CD burner
 * [[Exact Audio Copy]] CD Ripper
 * [http://cdexos.sourceforge.net CDex] CD ripper
+* [http://www.cdwave.com/ CD Wave]
 ===Taggers===
@@ Line 89: / Line 104: @@
 * [http://www.bitattack.ro/ai/ Audio Identifier]
 * [http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ mkvtoolnix] - tool to multiplex FLAC streams inside the Matroska container
 ...and many more; see the [http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#software FLAC software section] and [http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html#extras download section] for a more comprehensive list.