Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is a popular free audio compression codec that is lossless. Unlike lossy codecs such as MP3 and AAC, it does not remove any information from the audio stream and is suitable both for everyday playback and for archiving audio collections. "Free" means that the specification of the stream format can be implemented by anyone without prior permission, and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods is covered by any patent. The sources for libFLAC and libFLAC++ are available under Xiph.org's BSD license and the sources for flac, metaflac, and the plugins are available under the GPL.

Related Terms

FLAC: Free Lossless Audio Codec