# xiph/flac

Free Lossless Audio Codec

Repository: https://github.com/xiph/flac
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/flac
Homepage: https://xiph.org/flac/
Language: C
License: GFDL-1.3
License Family: other
Topics: audio, decoding, encoding, lossless, lossless-compression-algorithm, c
Last push: 2026-07-19T09:32:45+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 65/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 93, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4397, "days_push": 45, "days_rel": 568, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 1}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2399, forks 360 (observed 2026-08-28T04:06:43.751086+00:00)

## What it is
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is the open-source reference implementation of a patent-free lossless audio compression format, comprising libFLAC/libFLAC++ libraries plus the flac and metaflac command-line tools. It compresses digital audio without any quality loss and supports tagging, cover art, seeking, and Ogg FLAC container embedding.

## Use cases
- compress wav files to flac losslessly
- decode flac files back to wav
- rip cds to flac
- edit flac metadata tags from the command line
- add flac encoding support to my application
- convert audio to a lossless format for archiving music
- embed flac in an ogg container
- verify integrity of flac files

## When to choose
- you need lossless audio compression with no quality loss
- you want a patent-free, open format with a well-documented API
- you need fast encoding/decoding with wide player and device support
- you want to embed FLAC support in software via libFLAC or libFLAC++

## When to avoid
- you need lossy compression for maximum size savings (use MP3, Opus, or Vorbis)
- you need a pure GUI converter rather than libraries and CLI tools
- you need compression of non-audio data (use a general-purpose compressor like zstd)

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: audio-processing, compression, cli, sdk
- domain: media, cross-platform, developer-tools
- platform: cross-platform, windows, cli, c
- tags: lossless-audio-codec, flac, reference-implementation, encoder, decoder, metadata-editing, ogg-flac, xiph, audio, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- xiph/flac (main) score 65

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:43.751086+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T02:34:17.614640+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/xiph/flac (fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:43.751086+00:00, sha b4e767992be0)
  - homepage: https://xiph.org/flac/ (fetched 2026-08-29T10:14:51.304028+00:00, sha 6cc0054edf9e)
  - site_page: https://xiph.org/flac/documentation.html (fetched 2026-08-29T10:14:51.316048+00:00, sha a685c97f8293)
  - site_page: https://xiph.org/flac/features.html (fetched 2026-08-29T10:14:51.321463+00:00, sha 4f7005ed235f)
  - site_page: https://xiph.org/flac/documentation_tasks.html (fetched 2026-08-29T10:14:51.323271+00:00, sha bdceafdfd6d7)
  - site_page: https://xiph.org/flac/faq.html (fetched 2026-08-29T10:14:51.313342+00:00, sha 5cd752715c24)
  - site_page: https://xiph.org/flac/changelog.html (fetched 2026-08-29T10:14:51.317799+00:00, sha 1a2fc7367a55)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.