FLAC

FLAC Basics

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, originally developed by Josh Coalson. For more information on the format, see the FLAC homepage at SourceForge. FLAC is available as source code as well as executables for Windows, Linux, Mac, and several other operating systems. Plugins for a variety of media players have been developed.

The FLAC plugins were not developed by J.River. The original decoder plugin was developed by Oblong, and later plugins (both decoder and encoder) were developed by scthom. Although the plugins have been well tested by many users, bugs do occasionally develop and should be reported to the authors via Interact.

Required Components

There are two components to using FLAC inside MEDIA CENTER. One is the decoder, the other is the encoder. You can use either one or both. The encoder is used to make FLAC files while the decoder is used to play FLAC files and to tag files.

The FLAC plug-ins are always available from the mcplugins SourceForge page for both MC11 and MC12. Version 1 of the encoder and input plug-ins is for MC11, and version 2 is for MC12. Be sure to get the right version! Some versions of the plugins used to be available from the J.River download pages, but it now just sends you to the mcplugins page.

Inclusion in MC12

As of version 12.0.331, MC now includes a flac plugin. The included plugin is based on the scthom plugin, with the author's permission. The code was modified slightly due to differing compilers.

Currently, both J.River and scthom are supporting their own versions of the flac plugin.