FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format 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.

See About FLAC for more, or Using FLAC for how to play FLAC files, rip CDs to FLAC, etc.

Want iTunes to support FLAC? Visit our iTunes page to make your voice heard!

Several new devices with FLAC support were announced at 2007 CES, including the EVA 8000 from Netgear; the awesome-looking Sooloos; Cowon's iAudio D2, A3, and Q5; the i-Station Mini DX; and the MediaREADY MC. Roxio also recently released Record Now 9 Music Lab Premier with FLAC support.

Pixel Magic has added FLAC support to its HD MediaBox.

Sonos, Inc. has sent us a complete Sonos Digital Music System for review. Aside from being just plain cool, FLAC support is excellent; see our writeup for details.

Pearl Jam is selling recordings of many of their live shows in FLAC format.

Two new portables support FLAC, the Meizu M6 Miniplayer and the Teclast TL-29.

FLAC 1.1.3 released  Almost 2 years in the making, FLAC 1.1.3 is a major release with improved compression, improved cover art and multichannel support, better recovery for corrupted files, many new features and options in the command-line tools, and several bug fixes. For developers, the decoder and encoder APIs have also been simplified and there is a new porting guide. See the changelog entry for complete details. If your locale does not use "." for the decimal point, see this note.

Winamp 5.31 now includes Nullsoft FLAC plugins for encoding and decoding. The decoder is based on our reference decoder plugin. However the current encoder plugin is based on a pre-release of flake and we recommend to not use it for archival yet.

The new Helios X5000 HD network media player from Neodigits supports FLAC.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is making many recordings available in FLAC.

last updated 2007-Jan-18