Technical Summary
This document defines the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) format and
its streamable subset. FLAC is designed to reduce the amount of
computer storage space needed to store digital audio signals without
losing information in doing so (i.e., lossless). FLAC is free in the
sense that its specification is open and its reference implementation
is open-source. Compared to other lossless (audio) coding formats,
FLAC is a format with low complexity and can be coded to and from
with little computing resources. Decoding of FLAC has seen many
independent implementations on many different platforms, and both
encoding and decoding can be implemented without needing floating-
point arithmetic.
Working Group Summary
The WG is very small (6-8 active participants), but pretty much the entire
active part of the WG was involved in the consensus for this document, and the
GitHub repo for this specification shows 11 people who have contributed text to
the document, and discussion of issues and pull requests usually involves 3-5
participants. More WG members spoke than were silent.
Document Quality
There are two independent implementations (libFLAC and libavcodec), plus a list
of implementations, all described in the document.
It's worth noting that one of the challenges for this draft was collecting the
long and broad FLAC implementation history, to minimize the amount of
incompatibility this spec introduces. To give some idea of this constraint,
Windows, Android, MacOS/iOS, and SerinityOS all include FLAC libraries, and
FLAC can be implemented on bare hardware, so incompatibility is not taken
lightly.
An early media type review was solicited and feedback was addressed.
Personnel
The Document Shepherd for this document is Spencer Dawkins. The
Responsible Area Director is Murray Kucherawy.