AUSCC

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, in other words audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality, due to the fact that it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favourite player just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC allows tagging, cover art, and fast seeking. FLAC file is freely available and can be used on most operating systems, including Windows, “unix” (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X). There are many software and tool that support FLAC, but the core FLAC project here keeps the format and provides programs and libraries for working with FLAC files, FLAC tools or employing FLAC guides on playing FLAC files, ripping CDs to FLAC, etc. When we say that FLAC is “Free” it means more than just that it is obtainable at no cost. Its duty, and that neither the FLAC class nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding techniques are covered by any known patent source code that is obtainable under open-source licenses.

Notable features of FLAC:

Lossless: The encoding of audio (PCM) dataincurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical.

Fast: FLAC is asymmetric good for decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for a majority of perceptual codecs. Time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware.

Flexible metadata: FLAC’s metadata system supports tags, cover art, seek tables, and cue sheets. Applications can produce their own APPLICATION metadata once they register an ID: New metadata blocks can be explained and implemented in future versions of FLAC without disrupting older streams or decoders.

Streamable: Each FLAC frame contains enough information to decode that frame. FLAC does not even rely on earlier or following frames. FLAC uses sync codes and CRCs, which, along with framing, allow decoders to pick up in the middle of a stream with a minimum delay.

Convenient CD archiving: FLAC has a “cue sheet” metadata tag for storing a CD table of contents and all track and index points. For instance, you can rip a CD to a single file, then get in the CD’s extracted cue sheet while encoding to yield a single file representation of the whole CD. If your original CD is broken, the cue sheet can be given out later in order to burn an precise copy.