[flac-dev] FLAC is now formally specified in RFC 9639

[Martijn van Beurden]

Hi all,

Sorry for completely forgetting to inform the mailing list about this.
It has been too quiet here lately.

Anyway, RFC 9639 has been published, specifying the Free Lossless
Audio Codec (FLAC) format. See

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9639
https://xiph.org/flac/2024/12/19/rfc-9639-published.html

Although FLAC has had a specification document since 2000 and an
open-source reference implementation filling in the details, this
document should formally specify the format, such that implementers
don’t have to look at the reference source code or browse the mailing
list archives for details.

This publication doesn’t change the FLAC format except explicitly
adding support for 32-bit audio and adding restrictions to
accommodate, see here for details.

The main benefit this publication brings is that it should make
writing a new FLAC decoder implementation from scratch much easier. It
also provides assurance for archives wanting to use the FLAC format
that their files remain decodable in the far future, in case FLAC ever
becomes obsolete and its implementations unusable.

Many thanks for all who participated in improving this document.

Kind regards,

Martijn van Beurden