Hi, guys.

I'm looking for a freeware sound editor (win32) with FLAC support. I've searched via Google and Sourceforge but with no success. That's pretty weird, there are editors with wav/mp3/ogg support, but no FLAC. I don't need a very advanced sound editor, just base functions and nice looking.

P.S. With "support" I mean both - direct loading and saving.

I'm quite sure that Audacity should serve you well. I'm not sure if it supports FLAC out of the box but plugins will definitely allow what you want!

I know what you're after, but since FLAC is lossless, there isn't really much to be gained from editing it in its compressed form - uncompressing a FLAC to a WAV, editing the WAV, and then compressing back to FLAC will not change the sound quality at all, while the same operation with MP3 or OGG would very likely introduce additional artifacts due to lossy recompression. I guess if you had a huge FLAC file - a few hours in length, for instance - it would save disk space during the editing process, but that's about the only advantage I can think of.

The closest I've found to a native FLAC editor is CD Wave Editor. It's shareware, but it does have a 30 day trial period. It still doesn't edit FLAC natively - it does exactly what I described above, but internally.

Check out Goldwave. It does FLAC. It's not freeware, but you're not required to register it.

Thanks for the replies. Audacity project seems frozen and it doesn't support FLAC "yet", I'm afraid "yet" mean "never" here. I guess there is no clear freeware solution for the FLAC, that's weird and sad..

Most editors are just going to decompress to PCM first anyway. There is no reason not to use Audacity IMO. Decode to WAV first, then edit with Audacity. Later you can reencode it. A couple of steps are added, but this is the way that I edit a lot of files.

I think the audacity CVS supports FLAC to a certain extent. I think it does FLAC decoding but not encoding. Haven't tested it myself though!!!

Kristian

//edit

located the source where I found this information:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.pl?FreeLosslessAudioCodec

The wiki's info says newer 1.2.x stable verson will support both import/export. I hope it will out before next year.

You could try WavePad Audio Editing Software.
On the homepage it says it "Supports a number of file formats including wav (multiple codecs), mp3, vox, gsm, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg and more."

It can handle both decoding and encoding of FLAC


SH


Professional Audio Software
NCH Swift Sound