How does FLAC audio compression

I'm interested in the technical details. The official site doesn't go into any detail. Google searches reveal nothing. I thought it was open-source, so the algorithms should be too?

i have so many questions, here's one:

1. Would FLAC compression reduce the file size of a file containing 2 minutes white noise?

  Jubal said:

if google can't help you, maybe wiki can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac

wiki was the first one i checked, here are it's so called 'technical details':

  Quote

Technical details

 

FLAC supports only fixed-point samples, not floating-point. This is to eliminate any rounding errors to ensure bit-perfect reproduction. It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sampling rate from 1 Hz to 1,048,570 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8. Channels can be grouped in cases like stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of interchannel correlations to increase compression. FLAC uses CRC checksums for identifying corrupted frames when used in a streaming protocol, and also has a complete MD5 hash of the raw PCM audio stored in its STREAMINFO metadata header.

 

FLAC allows for Rice parameter between 0-16, and up to 8 channels of audio and a wide range of sampling rates up to 192 kHz, in various bits-per-sample width. FLAC also supports Replay Gain.

 

FLAC is implemented as libFLAC core encoder & decoder with the main distributable program flac being the reference program utilizing libFLAC API. This codec API is also available in the C++ as the libFLAC++.

 

The reference implementation of FLAC compiles on many platforms, including most Unix and Unix-like (including Linux, * BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X), Windows, BeOS, and OS/2 operating systems. There are build systems for autoconf/automake, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.

 

For tagging, FLAC uses the same system as Vorbis comments [3].

 

[edit] API Organization

nothing about how the algorithm works though :(

  Jubal said:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html

aahhh! thanks, i had looked on that site, but missed this page!

syntheme your avatar gives me a mild panic attack