Download FLAC 1.4.3

Version 1.4.3 of the Free Lossless Audio Codec, or FLAC, has been released. This sound file format stores data without losing information, as is the case with MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Opus, for example. FLAC is available for various operating systems and usually requires an external program that serves as a user interface. In Windows this can be done, for example, with ExactAudioCopy and foobar2000. The changelog for this release shows the following changes and improvements:

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 orders
• 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 of a WAV/AIFF/RF64/W64 file
• Fix output file not being deleted after error on Windows
• Removal of the –sector–align option

metaflac

• A lot of small fixes for bugs found by fuzzing
• Added options –append and –data-format, which makes it possible to copy metadata blocks from one FLAC file to another
• Added option –remove-all-tags-except
• Added option –show-all-tags (harridu, Martijn van Beurden)

libFLAC

• No longer write seektables to Ogg, even when specifically asked for. Seektables in Ogg are not defined
• Add functions FLAC__metadata_object_set_raw and FLAC__metadata_object_get_raw to convert between blob and FLAC__StreamMetadata

Build system

• Autoconf (configure)
  • The option –enable-64-bit-words is now on by default
• CMake
  • The option ENABLE_64_BIT_WORDS is now on by default

Testing/validation

• Fuzzers were added for the flac and metaflac command line tools
• Fuzzer coverage was improved