Nine years after the publication of the last significant thread, the Xiph.Org community has presented a new version of the free codec FLAC 1.4.0, which provides lossless audio encoding. FLAC uses only lossless encoding methods, which guarantees the complete preservation of the original quality of the audio stream and its identity with the reference version subjected to encoding. At the same time, the lossless compression methods used make it possible to reduce the size of the original audio stream by 50-60%. FLAC is a completely free streaming format, which implies not only the openness of libraries with the implementation of encoding and decoding functions, but also the absence of restrictions on the use of specifications and the creation of derivative versions. The library code is distributed under the BSD license.
Among the most important changes are:
- Added support for encoding and decoding with a quantization bit depth of 32 bits per sample (bit-per-sample).
- Improved compression efficiency at levels 3 to 8, at the cost of a slight reduction in encoding speed due to improved autocorrelation calculation accuracy. Increased encoding speed for levels 0, 1 and 2. Slightly improved compression at levels 1 to 4 by changing the adaptive heuristic.
- Significantly improved compression speed on 64-bit ARMv8 processors, thanks to the use of NEON instructions. Improved performance on x86_64 processors that support the FMA instruction set.
- The API and ABI of the libFLAC and libFLAC++ libraries have been changed (upgrading to version 1.4 requires rebuilding applications).
- Deprecated and will be removed in the next release of the plugin for XMMS.
- The libFLAC library and the flac utility provide the ability to limit the minimum bitrate for FLAC files, up to 1 bit per sample (may be useful when organizing live broadcasting).
- It became possible to encode files with sampling rates up to 1048575 Hz.
- The flac utility implements new options "--limit-min-bitrate" and "--keep-foreign-metadata-if-present".
Source: opennet.ru