FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless. 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)
FLAC compiles on many platforms: most Unixes (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 lossy data compression