The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) has introduced its new version 1.5, featuring several long-awaited improvements that will surely please both audiophiles and professionals. This release comes more than a year and a half after the previous version 1.4.3 and brings significant enhancements in both encoding and decoding processes.
Key Innovations
- Multithreaded encoding. The most notable feature of FLAC 1.5 is the introduction of a fully multithreaded encoder. This update allows for more efficient and faster audio conversion, especially on modern processors, which significantly improves users' workflows. Multithreaded encoding is available in both libFLAC and the command-line utility.
- Improved decoding. The new version enhances the decoder's ability to handle chained Ogg FLAC files containing multiple audio streams.
- Metadata management. libFLAC, libFLAC++, and the metaflac utility can now create a new file when modifying metadata instead of overwriting the existing one.
- Command-line enhancements. The command-line tool has received several updates, including full scanning of all metadata blocks in testing mode and an added check to ensure MD5 checksums are consistent when re-encoding FLAC files, guaranteeing data integrity.
- Platform-specific improvements. FLAC 1.5 addresses various platform-specific issues, such as improved build compatibility on older Android API levels and enhanced fuzzing methods for thorough testing.
- Web compilation. With support for emscripten, compiling FLAC for web environments has become more accessible.
FLAC is written in C and distributed under the BSD license.
Source: linux.org.ru
