FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless. The FLAC project consists of:

* The stream format * libFLAC, which implements a reference encoder, stream decoder, and file decoder * flac, which is a command-line wrapper around libFLAC to encode and decode .flac files * Input plugins for various music players (Winamp, XMMS, and more in the works)

This package contains the command-line tools flac (used for encoding and decoding FLACs) and metaflac (used for manipulating FLAC metadata.)