FLAC 1.1.4 is released; see the download page and latest comparison. The windows installer for 1.1.4 is not ready yet but should be along soon. If needed you can replace the binaries from the current (1.1.3) installer with the ones in the 1.1.4 .zip on sourceforge.

The main features of this release:

• Compression improvements in all modes (-0 .. -8) with no change to the format or decrease in speed
• Speed increases for all modes, both encoding and decoding. Encoding at -8 is twice as fast as in 1.1.3
• New --warnings-as-errors option for flac
• Simpler alternative form for --picture/--import-picture-from options
• Several bug fixes (apodization locale bug, FLAC-to-FLAC transcoding, etc)
• Reduced memory requirements

The complete changelog is at http://flac.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*.../changelog.html

Developers will be happy to know the API is unchanged!

Very nice work Josh. Some great improvements and fast bug-fixing.

BTW thanks to you and all the others for the alpha testing! The feedback was very helpful in tuning.

for downloaders, here are the checksums:

Thank you for all your hard work.

Thank you very much for your hard work, Josh!

@Synthetic Soul, will your batch file for transcoding from FLAC v1.1.2 to v1.1.3 work with the new v1.1.4? I was just going to move all my FLAC files to v1.1.3 when Josh released this new version! Now, I can't wait until I transcode to v1.1.4 (Thank you for your excellent work too ).

The batch file from Synthetic Soul will work. You just have to change the version string "flacVersion=113" to "flacVersion=114".

Thanks to Josh!

WOW! So many great improvements in so little time. Thanks for the effort, Josh!

Thanks a lot for your hard work, Josh!

I'm using FLAC v1.1.3 and feel good, and I'm so excite v1.1.4 roll out so fast, hope that the Foobar2000 and Audition filter update will be out soon.

I am surprised with the release so fast after 1.1.3. Great the dot/comma issue has been resolved.

I want to thank you and those who collaborate(d) for this fantastic compressor and all the dedicated efforts. FLAC is my preferred encoder and it will be for a long time (I think). Hopefully FLAC will become that popular that car radio manufacturers will implement it (besides Vorbis Ogg).

It's fascinating to see how, over the years, development activity (and interest in general) has shifted to lossless audio codecs. I realise that this is almost only isolated to the Hydrogenaudio crowd but it might announce a more global trend now that harddisks are getting bigger and cheaper. Anyway, I'm glad I made the switch to Flac a couple of years ago! If only I could find the time to re-encode my files to 1.1.4 ... .

Josh keep up the great work!

Thanks for your work, Josh. It's nice too see what a big improvement you could achieve in the last couple of weeks.

Btw, just in case it went unnoticed, a possible bug report has been posted in the "General Audio" section, here.

tnx,

quick test 1.1.3 vs 1.1.4 (using defaults: flac.exe file.wav) on 92 small files;
1.1.4
92 File(s) 459.040.498 bytes
1.1.3
92 File(s) 472.138.921 bytes

So flac 1.1.4 compresses worse than 1.1.3?

Yes, indeed - Great job you have done on this release also, Josh

I have personally switched back to WavPack, but you forsure deserves some kudo's for your coding skills and motivation for keeping up with all this for so many years

Best regards

CU, Martin

Thanks for this new release Josh!

fairway: nope, typo, fixed.

Wow I would say the compression quite increased a lot! I love Flac. But let's not forget TAK

Has anyone compiled an Intel (or Universal Binary) Macintosh version of this new FLAC 1.1.4 package?

Download link please. Thanks!

AFAIK, ntohl() is defined in <winsock.h> (actually <winsock2.h>) on all versions of VC++, so

should be in bitreader.c and bitwriter.c.

I tried but it won't.

Note that i have OGG-flacs.

Fantastic, what a great year this has been for Flac users, year as in 12 months, not calendar year

and flac -5 vs flac -8 on set of short 70 samples (flac 1.1.4):

70 short files
---------------------------
flac5\ 521.737.686 | render time ~3 minutes
flac8\ 516.297.252 | render time ~7 minutes
orig\ 1.502.251.352

edit, optimfrog v4.600ex defaults
frog\ 480.359.971 | render time ~9 minutes

(render times are really just aprox., decoding speed not tested)

Thanks for your great work Josh

Fantastic work Just after I reencoded to 1.1.3 too At least I can run a full reencode now to 1.1.4 as none of my files are encoded to this yet.

Thanks for the great work.
I'm getting double the speed for -8 encoding now.
One odd thing is that a few files on one of my albums have ended up slightly larger, though the album had an overall decrease so that's allright.

Great job Josh. I definitely appreciate the work you've put into FLAC.

I ran a quick test with Timer on a single image file (soundtrack to 'Finding Nemo') using no parameters (defaults). I have a P4 3GHz with 1GB RAM. If someone provides an optimized ICL SSE build, I'll be happy to test



Thanks, Josh!

Excellent stuff Josh

FLAC is, and has been, my lossless encoder of choice since I started using lossless audio compression (~3yrs now).

As I always use the --best (aka -8) switch I'm gonna notice a significant improvement, so that's brilliant.

Keep up the good work

Thanks Josh!

Appreciate all of your hard work and constant efforts to answer problems/questions posted in the forum. FLAC is still my codec of choice for my lossless encoding needs.
JXL

FLAC is my lossless codec of choice too. Hardware support is excellent (SqueezeBox in my case) and I never had a single problem with my FLAC files. Thank you Josh and please keep up the excellent work! I'm trying the new version right now and speed improvements as well as compression improvements really make my day!

thanks for the kind words everyone. I will take a look at that possible replaygain bug.

Another thanks from a FLAC user!! I'm excited about the increase in encoding speed. I've just started last weekend back up my CD collections and this new build will help it go by even faster!! Awesome job!

Great work jcoalson, thx.

Excellent news... so it seems 114 improved everything, which is great.

Now where are updated benchmarks comparing the lossless formats ^^

Not that I care, due to free+HWsupport+established... my support is surely won and I don't really care about other formats anymore..

Was looking forward to this release
Thanks!

Thanks for this new release. I was waiting for it before doing a batch convertion

Thanks Josh!

On a related note: to build with mingw32 (msys) I had to comment out these #ifdefs in bitreader/bitwriter.c so that #include <winsock.h> would be visible to the compiler, and manually add -lwsock32 to the linker options.

Thanks.

Now if only winamp's plugin could get a little love as well...
I've experienced problems when seeking near the end of the song. Also, apparently flac plugin for winamp doesn't support Media Library tags, preventing other plugins from reading the song info (such as albumlist, last.fm, etc...).

Thank you, Josh. Your excellent work is very much appreciated. I have my entire collection in FLAC (200GB) and look forward to 1.1.4. Keep up the good work!

Just wondering... If your collection is already archived in an earlier version of FLAC, is there any reason to transcode to a newer version, other than to save some additional space?

does this new version fixes this bug here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....1287&hl=bug

i was pretty disturbed with this, and the foobar guy said it's not at their end.

thanks for inputs!

Good question. I think the new version has some tagging upgrades (album art, lyrics, etc.) and some other improvements (check changelogs to be sure) beyond some space saving that I may take advantage of. I'll probably transcode to 1.1.4 eventually just to save a bit of space, but 1.1.2 has worked great for me. I like to keep on the most recent version if its not too much trouble and to encourage further improvements. If I can gain a few GB of space with an overnight transcode I'll probably do it.

great!
I try soon flac 1.1.4 for encoding my next album CD.
For now, I thank in advance ! for fixing the comma-bug, and especially speed improvements on flac -8 , which i use on my P3-800MHz, I am curious how it works out !

For my amusement (and piece of mind), I did:

Ripped a track to WAV
Encoded to 1.1.3 via FLAC front end using -8
File size was 27.7 mb

Converted via the lil batch program to 1.1.4
File size is 27.5 mb

Used the FLAC 1.1.3 to decode to WAV
Used FC /B to compare source WAV to decoded WAV....

No differences. I am pleased and impressed.

THANKS!!!

I was in the same boat, well figuratively speaking. My FLAC collection was still in 1.1.2 also. I started my conversion last night and I've been seeing some pretty decent improvements. On quite a few files from 1.1.2 to 1.1.4 I've been seeing as much as a 6% improvement. Although I must say that this is not the norm, on average I'd say the compression advantage I've observed is closer to 2% or thereabouts. 2% of 200GB is 4GB so that's a pretty decent reduction to me. YMMV.

EDIT: Instead of adding a new post, I'll just put my final results here. I ended up saving just over 5GB on my 200GB collection. Which ends up equating to 2.5%.

No, this version does not correct that behaviour. As noted in the other thread, if this is an annoyance you can simply use "%s" in place of "-" to create a temporary file, thus avoiding the use of a pipe, and obtain normal seek tables.

- M.

Thanks so much, hugely appreciated.

Offtopic:

How does flake compares to FLAC? Is flake format compatible to FLAC (I mean will FLAC play flake encoded files)?

Some benchmarking...

Versions tested: flac 1.1.2, 1.1.3 and 1.1.4
Compiled for x86_64 GNU/Linux (2.6.18.3 smp)
Settings used: -8 -V
Benchmarked on an AMD 4200+ x2 (dual core 2.2ghz), 2GB pc3200 ram, 74GB Raptor SATA hard drive

Test1, Long track, "Tanya" from Dexter Gordons "One Flight Up" CD (RVG Edition)
-- wave file: 193776620 Bytes or 184.8MB



Test2, Short Track, "Cue" from Yellow Magic Orchestras "Ultimate Collection CD2"
-- wave file: 47886764 Bytes, 45.7MB



small decrease in file size (always welcome) but more importantly, a very noticeable decrease in encoding time. I would like to know how such a large decrease in encoding time was achieved (different data structure used, etc). Regardless, very well done & thanks!

I'm trying to convert to Flac 1.1.4 using Foobar's custom encoder in the convertor with the flac.exe from the Flac homepage and the following parameters:

But Foobar gives the following error:

Do I have some parameter wrong or is it just impossible to do what I want to do?