FLAC reached maturity years ago. There are few gains to be made on the compression level without breaking compatibility and going for a new format. Nobody has discovered any lossless audio compression technique which can improve on flac's compression level by more than 5%, and everything besides TAK which improves on its compression at all is significantly slower esp. on decode. FLAC has good software and hardware support. What exactly do you guys want?

Complaining about FLAC "merging into xiph" is really bizarre. Xiph is not some sort of shadowy corporation, it's a loose collection of programmers- to some extent, it's whoever shows up to get work done on free codecs. FLAC has been "under the Xiph.Org banner" for almost ten years now.

FLAC is developed in a public repository. It has two active public mailing lists. Development was pretty much stalled for a few years. In the ~9 months since Erik became the primary maintainer it's seen a lot of activity again; take a look at commit messages, etc if you want an idea of the direction development is going. It's mostly build fixes and optimizations for a variety of platforms and compilers. Josh Coalson finally reappeared and has been involved a little bit from time to time too, but he's glad to have Erik filling that role.


Sure, some kind of major marketing breakthrough would be nice, and in a perfect world MS and Apple would get on board. But that doesn't mean there's any reason to complain about Erik and others.