Free flac software for linux

FLAC is Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.
This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.
FLAC is freely available and supported on most operating systems, including Windows, "unix" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. There are build systems for autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.
The FLAC project consists of:
the stream format
reference encoders and decoders in library form
flac, a command-line program to encode and decode FLAC files
metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for FLAC files
input plugins for various music players
When we say that FLAC is "Free" it means more than just that it is available at no cost. It means that the specification of the format is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source licenses. It is the first truly open and free lossless audio format.
Main features:
- Lossless: The encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.
- Fast: FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware.
- Hardware support: Because of FLACs free reference implementation and low decoding complexity, FLAC is currently the only lossless codec that has any kind of hardware support.
- Streamable: Each FLAC frame contains enough data to decode that frame. FLAC does not even rely on previous or following frames. FLAC uses sync codes and CRCs (similar to MPEG and other formats), which, along with framing, allow decoders to pick up in the middle of a stream with a minimum of delay.
- Seekable: FLAC supports fast sample-accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for playback, it makes FLAC files suitable for use in editing applications.
- Flexible metadata: New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions of FLAC without breaking older streams or decoders. Currently there are metadata types for tags, cue sheets, and seek tables. Applications can write their own APPLICATION metadata once they register an ID
- Suitable for archiving: FLAC is an open format, and there is no generation loss if you need to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, flac has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch.
- Convenient CD archiving: FLAC has a "cue sheet" metadata block for storing a CD table of contents and all track and index points. For instance, you can rip a CD to a single file, then import the CDs extracted cue sheet while encoding to yield a single file representation of the entire CD. If your original CD is damaged, the cue sheet can be exported later in order to burn an exact copy.
- Error resistant: Because of FLACs framing, stream errors limit the damage to the frame in which the error occurred, typically a small fraction of a second worth of data. Contrast this with some other lossless codecs, in which a single error destroys the remainder of the stream.
What FLAC is not:
- Lossy. FLAC is intended for lossless compression only, as there are many good lossy formats already, such as Vorbis, MPC, and MP3 (see LAME for an excellent open-source implementation).
- SDMI compliant, et cetera. There is no intention to support any methods of copy protection, which are, for all practical purposes, a complete waste of bits. (Another way to look at it is that since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!) Of course, we cant stop what some misguided person does with proprietary metadata blocks, but then again, non-proprietary decoders will skip them anyway.

FLAC is a lossless compression method for audio files. Using it, one is able to reduce the filesize and keep the same audio quality as a regular WAV file (CD quality).

The FLAC format is open source, and can be read without any problem by such applications as Amarok or Kaffeine.

Wav and Flac conversion contains two service menus: one to convert WAV files into FLAC, and one to convert FLAC files into WAV.

You will need the FLAC application to be installed on your system to use these service menus.

flac2mp3 project is a tool to convert audio files from flac to mp3 format.

ALAC comes from Apple Lossless Audio Codec, is a reference decoder for Apples lossless audio codec. The decoder has been written by reverse engineering Apples proprietory audio format.
Located here is a basic decoder for Apple Lossless Audio Codec files (ALAC). ALAC is a proprietary lossless audio compression scheme. Apple never released any documents on the format.
What I provide here is a C implementation of a decoder, written from reverse engineering the file format. It turns out that most of the algorithms in the codec are fairly well known. ALAC uses an adaptive FIR prediction algorithm and stores the error values using a modified rice or golumb algorithm. Further details are in alac.c.
Although an encoder is not provided, by using the decoder as a sort of specification it should be fairly trivial to write an encoder. By exploiting other lossless audio encoders, such as FLAC, the task will be much easier. Although one wouldnt be able to copy the compression algorithms verbatim, as adaptive compression is used in ALAC and not in FLAC. There are, however, a bunch of academic papers on the issue.
The program located here will not be able to handle all ALAC files, it can only handle mono or stereo files. ALAC allows up to 8 channels. It should be trivial to finish the implementation once I find files that I can test it with. Likewise the decoder only supports 16bit sample sizes. Again, it should be trivial to fix.
The decoder is fairly self explanatory, it can read an ALAC stream from either a file or from stdin, and write it as raw PCM data or as a WAV file to either stdout or a file. In theory one should be able to stream data to the decoder.
Enhancements:
- Supports ALAC files created with newer versions of quicktime, a number of speed optimisations that vastly improve performance, ability to decode m4a files with data before headers and windows improvements.

abcde is a frontend to cdparanoia, wget, cd-discid, id3, and your favorite Ogg Vorbis (the default), MP3, FLAC, Ogg Speex, or MPP (Musepack) encoder.
It grabs an entire CD and converts each track to the desired format, then comments or ID3-tags each file, all with one command.
It supports multiple output in a single CD read, the creation of a single track from a CD, resume operation, CD concatenation, volume normalization, gapless encoding (with LAME), parallelization, SMP, proxies, customizable filename organization and munging, playlist generation, distributed encoding via distmp3, and more.
Enhancements:
- Added support for MPP/MP+(Musepack) encoding. Although I am trying to
get 2.2 for Debian Sarge release, mpc seems safe enough to introduce. See
corecodec.org for code.
- Some POSIX shell corrections (making the code more portable). Thanks to
Guillem Jover for pointing the problem out.
- CDYEAR is also passed to do_move(), so one can use it for sorting the
directories.
- Small MacOS X fix, allowing directories with "()" to work. Thanks to Evan
Jones.
- On the MacOS X, I still do not know if abcde works correctly. If does
not, please, drop a note. Or else.
- DOSPLAYLIST also changes "/" with "".
- DATA tracks are now excluded from the ripping process using internally
the cdparanoia "-Q" query option. If using another ripper, it does not
work (at least there is no support for them in abcde)
(Closes: #112692, #117412).
- New "0" choice for "None of the above" has been introduced. If selected, a
template is created and the user encouraged to edit it (Closes: #147683).
- New options for when the PLAYLIST already exists: erase, append or keep.
- Bug fixes along the code:
- abcde.1 corrections and additions
- abcde corrections and code reorganization. abcde now exits earlier if
some of the options are incompatible. Also the actions are set as
variables earlier, so we use less calls to external tools.
- abcde.conf additions
- The GENRE is munged now in its own mungegenre function, so that no more
upper-to-lowercase is done (forced) except if the default is used.
- Examples added to the tarball and /usr/share/doc/abcde/examples with two
scripts to make abcde kind-of-a ripper daemon.
- Changed to experimental to have an stable 2.1.x version in Sarge.
- Add CDDB information to Ogg/Vorbis and FLAC files (Closes: #265358).
- Added INTERACTIVE option. Set it to "n" and there you go, without user
interaction.
- Changes normalize to normalize-audio (Closes: #267053)
- Copes with wav files being erased by the ripping tool.
- Small patch to support ()s in the path under MacOSX. Thanks to Evan Jones
for noticing and sending the patch.
- Added -w for COMMENT seed. Used to give a comment to a given CD.
- Option "-t " added to modify the numbering from a starting point
(Closes: #95828). Geez! That is low bug number...
- Added -T to modify also the tag entries on the songs. Currently available
for FLAC and Ogg/Vorbis.
- Removes trailing spaces (Closes: #280382).
- TRACKNAME now combines multi-lines from long CDDB entries.
- debian/rules:
- s/dh_installmanpages/dh_installman/

PACPL-KI is a Perl Audio Converter Kommander Interface.
Supported Encode Formats:
mp2, mp3, ogg, flac, fla, ape, shn, aac, m4a, mp4, mpc, mpp, wv, ofr, ofs, tta, pac, lpac, kxs, wav, aiff, au, snd, raw, voc, smp, avr, cdr, ac3, la, bonk, ra
Supported Decode Formats:
mp2, mp3, ogg, flac, fla, ape, shn, aac, m4a, mp4, mpc, mpp, wv, ofr, ofs, tta, pac, lpac, kxs, wav, aiff, au, snd, raw, voc, smp, avr, cdr, ac3, la, bonk, wma, ra, ram
Supported video to audio (decode only):
rm, rv, asf, avi, divx,mkv, mpg, mpeg, mov, ogm, qt, vcd, vob, wmv, flv
Main features:
- CD ripping to any of the Supported Encode Formats with CDDB support for naming / tagging, and naming scheme selection.
- Recursive directory conversions.
- Optional directory preservation when recursively converting a directory.
- Optional bitrate/quality selection before encoding via "Encoder Options".

BluePlayer is a cross-platform, simple, light sound player. BluePlayer supports the following file formats: WAV, uncompressed AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MOD, S3M, IT, and XM.
Main features:
- Cross platform
- Simple Light
- for GUI using FLTK widgets http://www.fltk.org/
- uses a Audiere sound library http://audiere.sourceforge.net/
- Supported file formats: Uncompressed WAV*, Uncompressed AIFF*, Ogg Vorbis*, FLAC*, MP3, MOD, S3M, IT, XM (* supports seeking)

Perl Audio Converter (PAC) is a tool for converting multiple audio types from one format to another. It supports MP2, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Shorten, Monkey Audio, FAAC (AAC/M4A/MP4), Musepack (MPC), Wavpack (WV), OptimFrog (OFR/OFS), TTA, LPAC, Kexis (KXS), AIFF, AC3, Lossless Audio (LA), AU, SND, RAW, VOC, SMP, RealAudio (RA/RAM), WAV, and WMA.
It can also convert audio from the following video formats/extensions: RM, RV, ASF, DivX, MPG, MKV, MPEG, AVI, MOV, OGM, QT, VCD, VOB, and WMV. A CD ripping function with CDDB support, batch and playlist conversion, tag preservation for most supported formats, independent tag reading/writing, and extensions for Konqueror and amaroK is also provided.
Enhancements:
- Added: MP4::Info dependency IO::String to pacpl-install
- Updated: License GPLv3
- Bug Fix: Directory conversions. pacpl was claiming the directory was empty and prompting to use the --recursive option...Thanks to John Meyer for the report.