FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.
FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.
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1.4.324 Jun 2023 18:05
minor feature:
The development for this release focused on the tools, flac and metaflac, whereas the previous few releases had the focus on libFLAC. The main improvement in flac is its handling of foreign metadata on decoding a file (i.e. restoring the foreign metadata), metaflac has had a few features added. Both tools have been vetted with fuzzing, resulting in numerous small fixes.
Changes
General
All PowerPC-specific code has been removed, as it turned out those improvements didn't actually improve anything
Large improvements in encoder speed for all presets. The largest change is for the fastest presets and for 24-bit and 32-bit inputs.
Small improvement in decoder speed for BMI2-capable CPUs
Various documentation fixes and cleanups (Mark Grassi, Jake Schmidt)
Various fixes (Ozkan Sezer, Zhipeng Xue, orbea, Sam James, Harish Mahendrakar)
Fix building on Universal Windows Platform (Dmitry Kostjučenko)
flac
A lot of small fixes for bugs found by fuzzing
Various improvements to the --keep-foreign-metadata and --keep-foreign-metadata-if-present options on decoding
The output format (WAV/AIFF/RF64 etc.) is now automatically selected based on what kind of foreign metadata is stored
Decoded file is checked afterwards, to see whether stored foreign format data agrees with FLAC audio properties
AIFF-C sowt data can now be restored
Add --force-legacy-wave-format option, to decode to WAV with WAVEFORMATPCM where WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE would be more appropriate
Add --force-aiff-c-none-format and --force-aiff-c-sowt-format to decode to AIFF-C
The storage of WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE_CHANNEL_MASK is no longer restricted to known channel orderings
Throw an error when WAV or AIFF files are over 4GiB in length and the --ignore-chunk-sizes option is not set
Warn on testing files when ID3v2 tags are found
Warn when data trails the audio data o
1.4.223 Oct 2022 13:45
minor feature:
1.4.123 Sep 2022 07:05
minor feature:
1.4.011 Sep 2022 03:45
minor feature:
1.3.422 Feb 2022 11:05
minor feature:
1.3.305 Aug 2019 11:45
minor feature:
1.3.201 Jan 2017 17:58
minor feature:
-- General:
Fix undefined behaviour using GCC/Clang UBSAN (erikd).
General hardening via fuzz testing with AFL (erikd and others).
General code improvements (lvqcl, erikd and others).
Add FLAC in MP4 specification docs (Ralph Giles).
MSVS build cleanups (lvqcl).
Fix some cppcheck warnings (erikd).
Assume all currently used OSes support SSE2.
-- flac:
Fix potential infinite loop on flac-to-flac conversion (erikd).
Add WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE to WAV (as needed) when decoding (lvqcl).
Only write vorbis-comments if they are non-empty.
Error out if decoding RAW with bits != (8 16 24).
-- metaflac:
Add --scan-replay-gain option.
-- build system:
Fixes for MSVC and Makefile.lite build systems.
-- libraries:
CPU detection cleanup and fixes (Julian Calaby, erikd and lvqcl).
Fix two stream decoder bugs (Max Kellermann).
Fix a NULL dereference bug (on a malformed file).
Changed the LPC order guess for a slight compression improvement, particularly for classical music (Martijn van Beurden).
Improved encoding speed on older Intel CPUs.
Fixed a seeking bug when decoding certain files (Miroslav Lichvar).
Put an upper bound (32768) on the number of seek points.
Fix potential memory leaks.
Support 64bit brword/bwword allowing FLAC__BYTES_PER_WORD to be set to 8 (disabled by default).
Fix an out-of-bounds heap read.
Win32: Only use large buffers when writing to disk.
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