Short for Free Lossless Audio Codec, a free codec developed by Xiph.org and used to compress audio files. FLAC is similar to MP3 except that it is lossless (the decoded audio is identical to what went into the encoder and is verified with a 16-bit CRC). None of FLAC s encoding/decoding methods are covered by patents, so the extensible source code is available under open-source licenses. FLAC is supported by most operating systems
.
