FLAC - links
Author: Josh Coalson
Description: A free, open source codec for lossless audio compression and decompression
Keywords: free,lossless,audio,codec,encoder,decoder,compression,compressor,archival,archive,archiving,backup,music

english | russian
links
The links page is the place for all things FLAC. The hardware section lists the home stereo, car stereo, and portable devices that support the FLAC format. The music section has links to artists, labels, and legal trading/sharing sites that offer works encoded in FLAC. The software section is a loosely categorized list of open-source software that supports the FLAC format. Some of the most popular (some non-free) software can be found on the download page in the extras section.
hardware
Below is a list of devices that support the FLAC format. So far we only have experience with the Squeezebox2 and Rio Reciever; see reviews below. Manufacturers, if you would like your product reviewed here, feel free to send a unit.
Home stereo:

- AudioReQuest music servers
- Avega Systems' wireless Oyster loudspeakers
- Digital Techniques' Blackbird Digital Music Players
- Escient's FireBall servers (E2-40/160/300, DVDM-300, SE-D1), networked home stereo components with hard-drives
- Hifidelio, a wireless home stereo component
- iMuse audio/video media servers
- Meda Systems' Bravo servers
- The MS300 Music Server by McIntosh Laboratory (brochure)
- Olive's Opus, Symphony, and Musica wireless digital music centers
- PhatNoise Home Digital Media Player
- PONTIS' MS330 Media Server
- Neodigits' Helios X5000 HD network media player
- Numark's DJ equipment like the HDX and CDX turntables with integrated hard drive and CD player, and the HDMIX mixer
- Rio Reciever and Dell Digital Audio Receiver via RioPlay, RRR, tRio, or xPLRio.net clients (review)
- Roku Photobridge HD via plugin
- Roku Soundbridge(*)
- SkipJam's networked audio/video devices
- Sonos Digital Music System
- Slim Devices' Transporter and Squeezebox networked audio players (review)
- Turtle Beach's AudioTron(*) via Bery Rinaldo's Samba VFS Module
- Zensonic Z500 Networked DVD Media Player
- Ziova's CS510 and CS505 network media players
- (*) device decodes FLAC to WAVE/PCM on server-side
- (**) device decodes FLAC to MP3 on server-side

Car stereo:

- Kenwood Music Keg
- PhatBox
- URAL ConceRt CDD
- Volvo's Digital Jukebox

Portable/Handheld:

- Bluedot's BMP-1430
- COWON's iAUDIO A2, iAUDIO F2, iAUDIO U3, iAUDIO M3, iAUDIO M5, iAUDIO T2, and iAUDIO X5
- Green Apple's portable media player: AP3000
- iPod via the Rockbox firmware replacement
- iRiver iHP-120/iHP-140/H320/H340 via the Rockbox firmware replacement
- Iwod G10
- Onda VX737
- Rio Karma
- TrekStor's Vibez

Reviews:
The main purpose of these reviews is to give an idea of how well particular devices support FLAC. Other subjective comments here are based on our general impressions and are not meant to be thorough or authoritative. We only review devices we have tested directly ourselves.
Rio Reciever: This little device is a hacker's dream. It plays audio over a network (Ethernet or HPNA) so it requires a PC to serve audio files. There are several open source clients available and since it boots its Linux distro over NFS you can write your own client. They're not made anymore but you can still find them on ebay. The main downsides: 1) small, hard-to-read LCD display; 2) FLAC support is only in third-party clients which take some work to set up.
Squeezebox2: A fantastic networked audio player. Has an excellent, easy-to-read vacuum fluorescent display, wired or wireless networking, optical and coax digital outs and analog out, a reputation for very high audio quality, multi-room synchronization, and a bunch of other features. The server-side software, SlimServer, is open-source, runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. and has an active community. FLAC support is excellent; nearly the full subset (e.g. sample rates up to 48kHz, 16- and 24-bits per sample) including all standard encoding modes are supported. Also supported are FLAC tags, automatic transcoding on the server of many audio formats to FLAC for transmission to the box, and external cuesheet support (internal cuesheet support is in the works).
music
Several labels and artists have adopted FLAC as a distribution format for their works, offering them for sale or free download online. And many online trading communities that share legal, band-sanctioned recordings of live shows distribute them in FLAC format. These are just some of them.
Artists

- Autechre
- Buckethead
- Charlie Hunter
- Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains
- Dave Matthews Band
- The Grateful Dead
- King Crimson
- They Might Be Giants
- Metallica
- Phish
- Primus

Labels and Stores

- AliveAudio
- ATO Records (Store)
- Bleep.com
- Burning Shed
- DigitalSoundboard.net
- digital-tunes
- DiscLogic
- EDM Digital
- Experimedia
- Fast Atmosphere
- FestivaLink.net
- Magnatune
- Mindawn
- morgan leah records
- Music is Here!
- Musictoday
- The Philadelphia Orchestra
- Smithsonian Global Sound
- Opsound

Venues:

- The Bonnaroo Music Festival

Communities:

- archive.org, the Internet Archive:
  - Live Music Archive
  - Net Labels
  - Open Source Audio
- dxdt.org
- etree.org
- The Furthur Network
- nugs.net: live music downloads

software
A large and growing list of software supports the FLAC format. This list is a sample of open-source software supporting FLAC. Some of the most popular non-free software can be found on the download page in the extras section.
Audio encoders/decoders/converters/taggers:

- EasyTAG versatile tagger
- Entagged, a Java audio file tagger
- etree-scripts: command-line tools for verifying, tagging, converting, and burning lossless audio files
- FLAC frontend (Windows GUI)
- Flac-Jacket: a set of scripts for creating FLAC files and an HTML index
- FLACTAG: tags single album FLAC files with embedded CUE sheets using data from the MusicBrainz service
- MacFLAC Mac OS X FLAC distribution
- MP3FS, a read-only FUSE filesystem which can transcode FLAC to MP3 on the fly
- rawrec/rawplay recording/playback tools
- sonice FLAC to Vorbis transcoder
- Split_wav WAV+CUE splitter
- Tag comprehensive tagger (frontend available)

Audio editors:

- Cooledit FLAC filter
- shntool

Audio players/servers:

- abcde (A Better CD Encoder)
- AlsaPlayer
- Aqualung, a Linux player
- Boss Ogg: Audio client/server
- Cynthiune: a music player for Mac OS X and GNUstep
- flac-tools: includes flac123 player
- GiantDisc: Linux jukebox + Palm remote
- JReceiver servlet-based audio server
- Media Center FLAC plugins
- MPD, Music Player Daemon
- MPlayer
- Mpxplay, a DOS player
- Muine: a music player for GNOME
- Musik: an open-source, cross-platform multimedia player and library
- MythTV: Linux PVR and more
- ripperX: X-based ripper/encoder
- Soepkip TNG music playing daemon + web interface
- Thomer's Music Vault: a Linux music server
- VideoLAN client
- Xine multimedia player
- xmcd: X CD player
- XMMS: X MultiMedia System

CD ripping/burning:

- Arson: KDE ripper/burner
- AutoFLAC: automated ripping and encoding to FLAC with EAC (ExactAudioCopy); also has a write mode for burning back to CD for an exact copy
- crip: console ripper/encoder/tagger
- Flacattack: an all-in-one tool that works with EAC (ExactAudioCopy) to encode a CD image to FLAC, embed the cuesheet, add ReplayGain, create lossy files, etc. all in a customizable directory structure
- MAREO multi-format encoder for EAC
- Max, a CD ripper and encoder for OS X
- rip command-line ripper/encoder
- RipIT, a console-based front-end to several ripping and encoding tools
- Wack, the successor to Flacattack which can encode to multiple formats at once

Organizers:

- Ampache, a PHP-based tool for managing, updating and playing files via a web interface
- GNUpod includes on-the-fly FLAC conversion to iPod
- MPEG Audio Collection
- Rhythmbox, music management application for GNOME

Plugins, developer tools and libraries:

- audiere, a high-level audio API
- Audio::FLAC perl module
- Audio::FLAC::Decoder perl module
- CoreFLAC: FLAC DirectShow filters
- DirectShow filters for encoding to/decoding from FLAC and Ogg FLAC (as well as Ogg Vorbis/Speex/Theora).
- FLACDotNet, a .NET wrapper around libFLAC
- getID3(): a PHP4 script for extracting metadata
- GStreamer streaming media framework
- jFLAC: Java native FLAC decoder
- J-Ogg Java libraries for Ogg decoding
- MediaXW includes FLAC DirectShow filter
- MMIOFLAC, Multimedia IOProc for OS/2
- Ptarmigan media parser for XML
- SDL_sound audio add-on to SDL
- WMP Tag Support Extender plugs in to Windows Media Player to allow access to FLAC tags
- XiphQT component for Quicktime/iTunes that supports Ogg FLAC

Scientific, Audio Analysis:

- HASAS HydroAcoustical Signal Analysis System

Copyright (c) 2004,2005,2006 Josh Coalson |  |  |