How To Install flac on Debian 10

Learn how to install flac on Debian 10 with this tutorial. flac is Free Lossless Audio Codec - command line tools

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install flac on Debian 10.

What is flac

flac is:

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.)

There are three methods to install flac on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install flac Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install flac using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install flac

Install flac Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install flac using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install flac

Install flac Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install flac using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install flac

How To Uninstall flac on Debian 10

To uninstall only the flac package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove flac

Uninstall flac And Its Dependencies

To uninstall flac and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove flac

Remove flac Configurations and Data

To remove flac configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge flac

Remove flac configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove flac configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge flac

Dependencies

flac have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install flac package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.