FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. 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 is freely available and supported on most operating systems, including
Windows, "unix" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. There
are build systems for autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.

See the features page for a complete list of features, or the comparison page to
see how FLAC compares with other lossless codecs.

The FLAC project consists of:

    * the stream format
    * reference encoders and decoders in library form
    * flac, a command-line program to encode and decode FLAC files
    * metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for FLAC files
    * input plugins for various music players



When we say that FLAC is "Free" it means more than just that it is available at
no cost. It means that the specification of the format is fully open to the
public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set
the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format
nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known
patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source
licenses. It is the first truly open and free lossless audio format