I noticed in the Help->About a reference to:

FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
Copyright © 2001-2005 Josh Coalson

I assume that foobar2000 embeds a particular implementation of the flac encoder/decoder. I have not found a way to point to an external implementation of FLAC. FLAC has released new versions since then and, as well, I have heard of 3rd party compiles of FLAC optimized for SSE(x) that seem to have significant improvements over the default compile. Is it possible to reference an external implementation of FLAC for playback (decode) or convert (encode).

The converter in foobar2000 0.9x uses commandline encoders for all formats, including FLAC. You cannot use an external decoder on the other hand.

Since I don't see a libflac.dll in the download, I assume flac is statically linked. If this is correct, I'd like to make a change request for foobar to dynamically link to flac. This may not be possible, since it might require flac to go through the same binary versioning dilemmas that png went through, but hopefully everyone has learned those lessons now.

The current FLAC decoder in fb2k is based on libflac v1.1.0, which is pretty old by now. I would really appreciate if you would please update the decoder with newest libflac sources in next fb2k version. Also, if you won't do this, since you maybe think that there will be no big difference in decoding speed, then i would seriously recommend that you atleast do it for the next release of libflac, since Josh has said that the decoding speed will be improved in the next release with about 15% - 20% and that current CVS sources allready has 15% faster decoding speed.

Thank's in advance.

Martin.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, but I guess it is a request to Josh.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what I'm talking about either, I just remember a number of years ago that there was a big discussion about versioning issues with libpng. I think it was mostly a *nix issue, but they decided to do something like separate out the binary (api) version and added the binary version to the name of the .dll. If you went with dynamic linking that might be an issue for implementors. I am currently unware of how libflac deals binary compatible versioning.