FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an open source, multiplatform and free command-line program implemented in C and designed from the ground up to act as a lossless audio codec tailored for POSIX operating systems.
FLAC is a very popular and highly acclaimed audio codec among audiophiles who want only the best quality available for their music library. The software acts as both an encode and decoder for .flac files. It’s also the fastest lossless audio codec available for free.
Key features include lossless quality, fast decoding and encoding, hardware support, flexible metadata, seekable, streamable, suitable for archiving, convenient CD archiving, as well as error resistant. It is not lossy and includes no DRM protection.
Getting started with FLAC
Most probably, FLAC can be found on the main software repositories of your Linux distribution, so we strongly suggest to install it from there, using the default package manager application of your distro.
Installing FLAC using the gzipped source archive is also possible, just download the latest version from Softpedia, save the archive somewhere on your computer, unpack it, open a Linux Terminal app and go to the location of the extracted archive files with the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/flac-1.3.1).
Then, you should use the ‘./configure’ command to optimize FLAC for a specific architecture, as well as to enable various hidden options that you might need. Next, run the ‘make’ command to compile the software and the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user to install it system wide.
Under the hood and supported OSes
Looking under the hood of the FLAC project, we can notice that it is written in the C programming language. Supported operating systems include Linux, BSD, Solaris, IRIX, IBM OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware architectures are supported at this time, though we recommend installing it on a 64-bit computer with a multi-core processor.
