FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLACs algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data. FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC has support for metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking. History
Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson. The bit-stream format was frozen when FLAC entered beta stage with the release of version 0.5 of the reference implementation on 15 January 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001.On 29 January 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph.org banner. Xiph.org is home to other free compression formats such as Vorbis, Theora, Speex and Opus.Version 1.3.0 was released on 26 May 2013, at which point development was moved to the Xiph.org git repository.
Various other containers are supported, independently from used operating system, depending on used playback software. See also
Comparison of audio coding formats

References
External links

Official website
Lossless audio formats comparison: measuring FLAC against five other lossless audio formats
Lossless comparison: FLAC against seven other lossless audio formats on Hydrogenaudio
GSMArena Phone Finder: all phones & tablets with FLAC support