FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec
More info
- Creator
- Josh Coalson
- Released
- Owner
- Xiph.Org Foundation
- Type
- Audio codec
- License
- BSD-3-Clause
- Website
- xiph.org/flac
Lossless audio compression — roughly half the file size of WAV, with bit-for-bit identical playback.
Josh Coalson released it in 2001; Xiph.Org took it over in 2003. It typically compresses to 50–60% of the original through linear prediction and Rice coding. No psychoacoustic model and nothing discarded — decompress a FLAC and you get exactly the same samples back.
The standard for archival and for hi-fi streaming (Tidal, Qobuz, Apple Music Lossless). It supports embedded cover art, ReplayGain and per-block checksums, making the format self-validating.