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FLAC

From Encyclopedia Dramatica
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anti-aircraft fire Template:Infobox software Template:Infobox file format Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an audio compression codec primarily authored by Josh Coalson. FLAC employs a lossless data compression algorithm. A digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of their original size.[1]

FLAC is an open and royalty-free format with a free software implementation made available. FLAC has support for tagging, cover art, and fast seeking. Though FLAC playback support in portable audio devices and dedicated audio systems is limited compared to formats like MP3,[2] FLAC is supported by more hardware devices than competing lossless formats like WavPack.[1]

History

Development started in 2000 by Josh Coalson.[3] The bit-stream format was frozen when FLAC entered beta stage with the release of version 0.5 of the reference implementation on 15 January 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001.[3]

On 29 January 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph.org banner. Xiph.org is behind other free compression formats such as Vorbis, Theora, Speex, and others.[3][4][5]

On 17 September 2007, the version 1.2.1 was released.Template:Elucidate

The project

The FLAC project consists of:

  • The stream formats
  • A simple container format for the stream, also called FLAC (or Native FLAC)
  • libFLAC, a library of reference encoders and decoders, and a metadata interface
  • libFLAC++, an object wrapper around libFLAC
  • flac, a command-line program based on libFLAC to encode and decode FLAC streams
  • metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for .flac files and for applying Replay Gain
  • Input plugins for various music players (Winamp, XMMS, foobar2000, musikCube, and many more)
  • With Xiph.org incorporation, the Ogg container format, suitable for streaming (also called Ogg FLAC)

"Free" means that the specification of the stream format can be implemented by anyone without prior permission (Xiph.org 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 patent. It also means that the reference implementation is free software. 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.

In its stated goals, the FLAC project encourages its developers not to implement copy prevention features of any kind.[6]

Comparisons

FLAC is specifically designed for efficient packing of audio data, unlike general purpose lossless algorithms such as DEFLATE which is used in ZIP and gzip. While ZIP may compress a CD-quality audio file by 10–20%, FLAC achieves compression rates of 30–50% for most music, with significantly greater compression for voice recordings.

FLAC uses linear prediction to convert the audio samples to a series of small, uncorrelated numbers (known as the residual), which are stored efficiently using Golomb-Rice coding. It also uses run-length encoding for blocks of identical samples, such as silent passages. The technical strengths of FLAC compared to other lossless formats lie in its ability to be streamed and decoded quickly, which is independent of compression level.

Since FLAC is a lossless scheme, it is suitable as an archive format for owners of CDs and other media who wish to preserve their audio collections. If the original media is lost, damaged, or worn out, a FLAC copy of the audio tracks ensures that an exact duplicate of the original data can be recovered at any time. An exact restoration from a lossy archive (e.g., MP3) of the same data is impossible. FLAC being lossless means it is highly suitable for transcode e.g. to MP3, without the normally associated transcoding quality loss. A CUE file can optionally be created when ripping a CD. If a CD is read and ripped perfectly to FLAC files, the CUE file allows later burning of an audio CD that is identical in audio data to the original CD, including track order, pregaps, and CD-Text. However, additional data present on some audio CDs such as lyrics and CD+G graphics are beyond the scope of a CUE file and most ripping software, so that data will not be archived.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has adopted the FLAC format for the distribution of high quality audio over its Euroradio network.

Technical details

FLAC supports only fixed-point samples, not floating-point. This is to remove the imprecision of floating point arithmetic so as to ensure the encoder is fully lossless. It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sampling rate from 1 Hz to 655,350 Hz in 1 Hz increments,[7] and any number of channels from 1 to 8.[8] Channels can be grouped in cases like stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of interchannel correlations to increase compression. FLAC uses CRC checksums for identifying corrupted frames when used in a streaming protocol, and also has a complete MD5 hash of the raw PCM audio stored in its STREAMINFO metadata header. FLAC allows for a Rice parameter between 0–16. FLAC supports Replay Gain.

FLAC is implemented as the libFLAC core encoder & decoder library with the main distributable program flac being the reference program utilizing the libFLAC API. This codec API is also available in C++ as libFLAC++.

The reference implementation of FLAC compiles on many platforms, including most Unix (such as Solaris and Mac OS X) and Unix-like (including Linux, BSD), Windows, BeOS, and OS/2 operating systems. There are build systems for autoconf/automake, MSVC, Watcom C, and Xcode. There is currently no multicore support in libFLAC.

For tagging, FLAC uses the same system as Vorbis comments.[7]

API organization

libFLAC API is organized into streams, seekable streams, and files (listed in the order of increasing abstraction from the base FLAC bitstream). Most FLAC applications will generally restrict themselves to encoding/decoding using libFLAC at the file level interface.

Software support

Encoding

Name Description Platform
Windows Mac OS X Linux
Adobe Soundbooth Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
aTunes Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:No
ALLPlayer Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Audacious Template:No Template:No Template:Yes
Audacity Since version 1.2.5[9] Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:Yes
Cakewalk SONAR Producer Edition version 7 and later. Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Easy Media Creator Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Exact Audio Copy Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
FlaCuda An experimental LGPL encoder that runs on Nvidia GPGPUs with CUDA support. On high end GPUs it has been reported to outperform CPU encoders by an order of magnitude.[10] Multi-channel or higher than 16 bit depth are not yet supported.[11] Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:No
Flake (and libFlake) An independent LGPL implementation purported to be faster at the same compression ration than the reference libFlac; it also offers some experimental higher compression ratios.[12] An experimental version that supports multiple threads/cores has been developed by a third party.[13] Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:No
FFmpeg Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:Yes
foobar2000 With external encoder Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
fre:ac Rips directly from CD to FLAC file. Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
GoldWave Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
GOM Player Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Grip Grip is a cd-player and cd-ripper for the Gnome desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia builtin, but can also use external rippers (such as cdda2wav). Template:No Template:No Template:Yes
JetAudio Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Juce Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:No
Max Template:No Template:Yes Template:No
Media Center Since version 12.0.3xx Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
MediaMonkey Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Nero Burning ROM With optional external filter plug-in. Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
REAPER Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:No
Samplitude Since version 10.2 Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Sound Forge Version 9 and later Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Sound Normalizer Beginning with version 3 Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Vegas Pro 8, Vegas Pro 9 Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
Toast Titanium Beginning with version 7 Template:No Template:Yes Template:No
VLC media player Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:Yes
WaveLab Added in version 7.1 Template:Yes Template:Yes Template:No
Winamp Since 5.35 uses Flake.[14] Versions before 5.54 generate an incorrect MD5 checksum.[15] Template:Yes Template:No Template:No
xACT Not to be confused with Microsoft's XACT audio programming library. Template:No Template:Yes Template:No
XLD Template:No Template:Yes Template:No
Yahoo! Music Jukebox Template:Yes Template:No Template:No

Decoding

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Ripping

Template:Col-begin Template:Col-3

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Template:Col-end

Hardware support

Native

  • TRAXMOD Open source, open hardware portable MMC/SD player supports 44.1 kHz/16-bit stereo FLAC playback.
  • Onkyo TX-NR906 Supports 16 bit/24 bit at 44.1 kHz/48 kHz/96 kHz Mono & Stereo FLAC files through external USB with metatag display support.
  • Pioneer SC-05, SC-07, SC-25, SC-27, SC-35, SC-37 and SC-09TX support via external USB (network support verified)
  • Denon AVP-A1HDCI, AVR-4810, AVR-4310, AVR-3310, AVR-5308, AVR-4308, AVR-3808 AV Receivers[17]
  • Yamaha RX-V2065 AV Receiver, RX-A1000/A2000/A3000 AV Receiver , RX-V1067, RX-V2067, RX-V3067 AV Receivers
  • Meridian Sooloos
  • Escient[18]
  • iAudio (Cowon) - A2, A3, 6, 7, F2, O2, M3, M5, X5, U3, U5,[19] D2, D2+, S9, J3, X7 native support with newer firmware.
  • Olive (Symphony, Musica, Opus)[20]
  • PhatBox Hard Drive based in car Digital Media Player from PhatNoise
  • Rio Karma
  • SanDisk Sansa Fuze, Clip (with updated firmware),[21][22] Clip+,[23] Fuze+
  • Squeezebox and Transporter network music players from Logitech. Current products decode natively, old v1 units transcode to PCM on the server.
  • Sonos 16bit max.
  • Meizu M6 Mini Player, M3 Music Card
  • VEDIA A10, B6
  • Pixel Magic Systems' HD Mediabox (with firmware 1.3.4 or higher)
  • Embedded Waveplayer- Module with FLAC level 0-2 support, MIDI and serial interface
  • Teclast T29, T39, C260, C280, C290
  • Trekstor Vibez
  • T+A Music Player[24]
  • Linn Klimax DS (Digital Stream) - Digital Music Player
  • Linn Akurate DS - Digital Music Player
  • Linn Majik DS - Digital Music Player
  • Linn Sneaky Music DS - Digital Music Player
  • iriver E200, E150, E100,[25] E50, E30, Lplayer, SPINN.
  • Networked Media Tank and WIKI
  • Archos 5 Internet Tablet
  • Archos Internet Media Tablets [26]
  • Naim Audio HDX Hard Disk Player,[27] NaimUniti, UnitiQute, DAC, NDX, UnitiServe
  • Samsung YP-U5[28]
  • Creative Zen X-Fi 2
  • WD TV
  • Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ HD
  • Samsung Galaxy S
  • Samsung P3
  • TVIX HD M-6500, N1 (cafe), HD M-6600A/N Plus, HD M-7000
  • Nokia N900
  • Philips NP 2900 Streamium

Non-native with customized firmware and/or applications

See also

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FLAC is part of a series on

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Visit the [[Portal:{{{2}}}|{{{2}}} Portal]] for complete coverage.

References

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Comparison". FLAC. Retrieved 27 January 2008.
  2. ↑ "Links". FLAC. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "News". FLAC. Retrieved 2009-08-31.
  4. ↑ Xiph.Org Foundation (29 January 2003). "FLAC Joins Xiph.org". Xiph.org Foundation. Retrieved 31 August 2009.
  5. ↑ Emmett Plant. "FLAC Joins Xiph!". Xiph.org Foundation. Archived from the original on May 29, 2008. Retrieved 31 August 2009. Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  6. ↑ "Developers". FLAC. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "FAQ". FLAC. Retrieved 25 January 2009.
  8. ↑ "Format". FLAC. Retrieved 15 November 2009.
  9. ↑ Audacity development team (2006-10-30). "Audacity 1.3.2 a 1.2.5 released". Retrieved 19 January 2010.
  10. ↑ http://cuetools.net/doku.php/flacuda
  11. ↑ http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=64628&st=100 posts 105 and 107
  12. ↑ http://flake-enc.sourceforge.net/benchmarks.html
  13. ↑ http://softlab-pro-web.technion.ac.il/Projects/2008Winter/Performance%20Tuning/website/downloads.html
  14. ↑ http://flake-enc.sourceforge.net/download.html
  15. ↑ http://forums.winamp.com/showpost.php?p=2352917&postcount=8
  16. ↑ http://www.latestintech.com/the-core-media-player/
  17. ↑ Pid=340 "DENON UK" Check |url= value (help). Retrieved 27 January 2008. Text "Home Audio Components" ignored (help) Template:Dead link
  18. ↑ "Supported Digital Music Formats & Tagging Requirements" (PDF). Escient. p. 2. Retrieved 27 January 2008.
  19. ↑ Korean firmware V2.13Template:Dead link
  20. ↑ "Save The Sound. - Olive'S Free Cd Ripping Service - Preload Terms". Retrieved 27 January 2008.
  21. ↑ "Sansa Fuze updated to support Ogg and FLAC". Retrieved 18 October 2008.
  22. ↑ "Sansa Clip Firmware 01.01.30 Released". Retrieved 18 October 2008.
  23. ↑ anythingbutipod.com: SanDisk Sansa Clip+ Plus Review
  24. ↑ "T+A E-Series Music-Player". Retrieved 27 January 2008.
  25. ↑ "iRiver E100".
  26. ↑ "Archos 5 and Archos 7 - Firmware Changes". Update.archos.com. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
  27. ↑ "Naim Audio HDX".
  28. ↑ "Samsung". Retrieved 8 October 2009.
  29. ↑ "WiiBrew Wiki entry for MPlayerWii". Retrieved 13 January 2009.
  30. ↑ "WiiBrew Wiki entry for WiiMC". Retrieved 25 February 2011.
  31. ↑ "Data Compression and Reduction Options for 7-Series Recorders | Sound Notes | Sound Devices, LLC". Retrieved 27 January 2008.
  32. ↑ "File Details-LightMP3-v1.7.1-(FLAC-bugfix)-PSP-Homebrew-Applications". Dl.qj.net. 13 March 2009. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
  33. ↑ Leif H. Wilden. "Symbian OggPlay". Symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
  34. ↑ SourceForge.net - OggPlay

External links

Template:Compression formats Template:Compression software implementations Template:Xiph.org

ca:FLAC cs:Free Lossless Audio Codec da:FLAC de:Free Lossless Audio Codec es:Free Lossless Audio Codec eo:FLAC fr:Free Lossless Audio Codec gl:FLAC ko:FLAC id:FLAC it:Free Lossless Audio Codec he:FLAC lt:FLAC hu:Free Lossless Audio Codec nl:FLAC ja:FLAC no:FLAC pl:FLAC pt:FLAC ru:FLAC simple:FLAC sk:Free Lossless Audio Codec fi:FLAC sv:Free Lossless Audio Codec tr:FLAC uk:FLAC vi:FLAC yo:Free Lossless Audio Codec zh:FLAC

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