FLAC 1.0.4 released There are a lot of improvements since 1.0.3; let's get right to it:

flac:

Improved option parser (now uses getopt).
AIFF input support (thanks to Brady Patterson).
Small decoder speedup.
--sector-align now supported for raw input files.
New -T, --tag options for adding Vorbis comments while encoding.
New --serial-number option for use with --ogg.
Automatically writes vendor string in Vorbis comments.
Drastically reduced memory requirements.
Fixed bug where extra fmt/data chunks that were supposed to be skipped were not getting skipped.
Fixed bug in granulepos setting for Ogg FLAC streams.
Fixed memory leak when encoding multiple files with -V.

more..

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

Plugins:

Support for Vorbis comments, ID3 v1 and v2 tags.
Configurable title formatting and charset conversion in XMMS plugin.
Support for 8- and 24-bit FLAC files. There is a compile-time option for raw 24- bit output or 24bps-to-16bps linear dithering (the default).

metaflac:

UTF-8 support in Vorbis comments.
New --import-vc-from and --export-vc-to commands for importing/exporting Vorbis comments from/to a file. For example, the following can be used to copy tags back and forth:
metaflac --export-vc-to=- --no-utf8-convert file.flac | vorbiscomment --raw -w -c file.ogg
vorbiscomment -l --raw file.ogg | metaflac --import-vc-from=- --no-utf8-convert file.flac
Fixed bug #606796 where metaflac was failing on read-only files.

Libraries:

All APIs now meticulously documented via Doxygen. See here.
New libOggFLAC and libOggFLAC++ libraries. These wrap around libFLAC to provide
encoding and decoding of Ogg FLAC streams, providing interfaces similar to the ones of the native FLAC libraries. These are also documented via Doxygen.
New FLAC__SeekableStreamEncoder and FLAC__FileEncoder in libFLAC simplify common encoding tasks.
New verify mode in all encoders.
FLAC__stream_encoder_finish() now resets the defaults just like the stream decoders.
Drastically reduced memory requirements of encoders and decoders.
Encoder now automatically writes vendor string in VORBIS_COMMENT block.
Encoding speedup of fixed predictors and MD5 speedup for 16bps mono/stereo signals on x86 (thanks to Miroslav Lichvar).
Fixed bug in metadata interface where a bps in STREAMINFO > 16 was incorrectly parsed.
Fixed bug where aborting stream decoder could cause infinite loop.
Behavior change: simplified decoder *_process() commands.
Behavior change: calling FLAC__stream_encoder_init() calls write callback once for "fLaC" signature and once for each metadata block.
Behavior change: deprecated do_escape_coding and rice_parameter_search_distance in encoder.

I wonder why the winamp plugin doesn't feature a simple tag editor ?
some file info could be there as well. Compression ratio, file size etc.!

I will gladly accept patches for this Windows GUI coding is not my forte; I basically fire up the old NT4 box only to do testing and build the win32 binary release.

As a side question, why does an id3 tag editor have to appear in each individual input plugin? Isn't it common to any input file type that supports id3?


Not sure what you mean but the comparison table is up to date:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

Josh

No, he means properties of the selected file, for example:
file length: 3:20
file size (uncompressed): 35280000 bytes
file size (compressed): 20240500 bytes
compression ratio: 57,4 %
average bitrate
etc.

yes, exactly!

anyone willing to add this to the plugin ? john ? case?

Another question:
With an earlier version of FLAC (1.02) I could easily enter a commandline like this in a DOS box and it worked fine:
'flac -t *.flac'

But since 1.03 I get an error message, it seems that wildcards are not parsed correctly. I'm running Win98 SE (still...).

Don't know why... were you using the flac 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 binaries from Sourceforge? The compile methods and options processing code were very similar I believe.

I thought that by default COMMAND.COM does not do the globbing but some MS flavors of the C startup code would glob into argc/argv before calling main(). I always build the binaries with MSVC 6.

If you run flac under Cygwin (bash) it's a moot point as the shell will do the globbing.

Josh

Thanks for your reply Josh, sorry that I do not fully understand, because I am not a program developer

The strange thing was that playing around with the older 1.02 and 1.03 Sourceforge binaries yielded the same error messages like 1.04:

:D:\tmp>flac -t *.flac
:
:flac 1.0.4, Copyright © 2000,2001,2002 Josh Coalson
:flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
:welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.
:
:
:*.flac: ERROR initializing decoder
: state = 2:FLAC__FILE_DECODER_ERROR_OPENING_FILE

After a little more searching I found the 1.02 binary that worked:
:D:\tmp>flac -t *.flac
:
:flac 1.0.2, Copyright © 2000,2001 Josh Coalson
:flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
:welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.

:01_Rattlesnake_Live.flac: ok

Unfortunately I don't remember where I got it from, but filedate and size are as follows:
FLAC EXE 53.760 05-01-02 17:10 flac.exe
(Where date is dd-mm-yy)

BTW all this is not a big deal, since I can easily use Speeks frontend to perform the task.
edit:forum software made emoticons of my DOS prompts.....

hahaha... it's funny when that happens :)

The one that works could be the ICL compiled version that I think john33 does.

Josh