1Thanks for considering contributing to the FLAC project! 2 3Contributing to FLAC is possible in many ways. Among them are 4 5- Reporting bugs or other issues at https://github.com/xiph/flac/issues 6- Submitting patches at https://github.com/xiph/flac/pulls 7- Testing FLAC playing devices and software at 8 https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=FLAC_decoder_testbench 9 10General communication not specific to issues is generally done through 11the FLAC mailing lists: 12 13- For user questions and discussions: 14 https://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac 15- For developer questions and discussions: 16 https://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev 17 18## Goals 19 20Since FLAC is an open-source project, it's important to have a set of 21goals that everyone works to. They may change slightly from time to time 22but they're a good guideline. Changes should be in line with the goals 23and should not attempt to embrace any of the anti-goals. 24 25**Goals** 26 27- FLAC should be and stay an open format with an open-source reference 28 implementation. 29- FLAC should be lossless. This seems obvious but lossy compression 30 seems to creep into every audio codec. This goal also means that flac 31 should stay archival quality and be truly lossless for all input. 32 Testing of releases should be thorough. 33- FLAC should yield respectable compression, on par or better than other 34 lossless codecs. 35- FLAC should allow at least realtime decoding on even modest hardware. 36- FLAC should support fast sample-accurate seeking. 37- FLAC should allow gapless playback of consecutive streams. This follows from the lossless goal. 38- The FLAC project owes a lot to the many people who have advanced the 39 audio compression field so freely, and aims also to contribute through 40 the open-source development of new ideas. 41 42**Anti-goals** 43 44- Lossy compression. There are already many suitable lossy formats (Ogg 45 Vorbis, MP3, etc.). 46- Copy prevention, DRM, etc. There is no intention to add any copy 47 prevention methods. Of course, we can't stop someone from encrypting a 48 FLAC stream in another container (e.g. the way Apple encrypts AAC in 49 MP4 with FairPlay), that is the choice of the user. 50 51 52## Contributing patches 53 54Contributions to FLAC should be licensed with the same license as the 55part of the FLAC project the contribution belongs to. These are 56 57- libFLAC and libFLAC++ are licensed under Xiph.org's 58 BSD-like license (see COPYING.Xiph), so contributions to these 59 libraries should also be licensed under this license, otherwise they 60 cannot be accepted 61- the flac and metaflac command line programs are licensed under GPLv2, 62 see COPYING.GPL 63- the helper libraries for flac and metaflac (which are in src/share) 64 are licensed under varying licenses, see the license preamble for each 65 file to see how they are licensed 66 67Patches can be contributed through GitHub as a Pull Request. 68Alternatively you can supply patches through the mailing list. 69 70## Code style 71 72FLAC does have its own peculiar coding style that does not seem to fit 73general categories. You can use `git clang-format` to have your patch 74auto-formatted similar to the rest of the code. 75