The Xiph.Org community has published an update to the free audio codec FLAC 1.5.0, which allows you to compress audio without losing quality. FLAC uses only lossless encoding methods, which guarantees 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 allow you 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 changes in the new version:
- The encoder is now supported in multi-threaded mode. The multi-threaded encoder can be used via libFLAC or via the flac command line utility.
- Added the ability to decode chained Ogg files, which contain multiple independent FLAC audio streams packed into one file.
- libFLAC, libFLAC++ and metaflac now support writing to a new file when metadata changes, instead of overwriting the existing file. libFLAC now checks whether a symbolic link is specified as the input file when metadata changes, and implements write protection to such files when replacing the file in place.
- The API of the libFLAC and libFLAC++ libraries has been expanded.
- The implementation of the LMS (Loose Mid-Side) mode has been adapted for multi-threaded operation, separately encoding information common to stereo channels and the difference between the left and right channels.
- Implemented support for compilation into WebAssembly representation by the Emscripten compiler.
- The specification for the FLAC format is fixed in RFC 9639.
- The flac utility now checks for MD5 hashes when recoding an existing FLAC file. The "flac -t" test mode now parses all metadata blocks and displays warnings when ID3v1 metadata is detected. The built-in hint for available options has been improved. The format for storing external metadata used by the flac utility has been documented.
- The GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) has been updated to version 1.3 (previously version 1.2).
Source: opennet.ru
