Has anyone tested this flac program?

i have. it works like a charm. currently, it can compress more efficiently than FLAC can(meaning less file size). although you do risk a 1 or 2 second decoding speed increase(compared Flake -12 with FLAC -8), i think that it's worth it.

And is the quality good? I mean ( I know about those ABX tests): does everything seem ok?
How large is a CD ripped at 12x?

Look up the term "lossless". Theres absolutely no need to perform ABX tests, since data should be THE SAME! Decode and bitcompare to make sure everything was okay

Look up the meaning of the sentence "Insinuating that the poster is a lazy idiot and not presuming that it is in fact a guy who came to this forum for some friendly advice concerning how flake and flac match up".

Last I knew, there were concerns about the integrity of files made with Flake; Josh Coalson doesn't recommend using it for encoding purposes, since it in many cases silently creates errors which result in functionally "lossy" files.

That is, unless something has changed since I read that.

Justin Ruggles(the developer of Flake) fixed that a couple of months ago.

I already answered that.

IMHO FLAKE is much better than FLAC 1.12 but since FLAC 1.14 was released there isn't any significant advantage

Decoding errors, sample offsets...

it still compresses better than FLAC 1.14 at -12.

I've heard some people in other forums mention that Flake created files (especially at the -12) do not playback properly in SlimDevices. Can anyone else verify that?

sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't but the differences I've seen are always a small fraction of a percent.

you can get the same effect with flac-1.1.4 by adding "-l 32 --lax" after -8 but I don't recommend it as any compression increase is very small and it's not in the FLAC subset. flake -11 or -12 are not in the subset either and generally should not be used. unfortunately these setting are available in the winamp plugin which people will naturally use without being notified of the disadvantages.

the reason they may not play in some hardware players is the high LPC order which increases the # multiply-accumulates per sample.

the next version of flac (current CVS actually) I think will have encoding speed in all modes on par with flake in all modes, maybe faster.

Josh

I believe Winamp 5.34 (now in beta) is currently using FLAC 1.1.4 code for both encoding and decoding (and has dropped using FLAKE). This should keep everyone using Winamp FLAC compliant, and avoid all pitfalls of people using -11 or -12 settings of FLAKE by accident.

Josh, glad to hear you have posted in CVS an improved version of the FLAC encoder. Hopefully the new FLAC encoder still produces files that are backward compatible for playback with older FLAC decoders also.

FYI, Mike Wren's site and cyberial.com domain are down. You might want to remove the download windows FLAC installer broken link to his site.

Keep up the good work!

yep, changes are backwards compatble. fixed installer link. also I almost have an installer done, should have something to try next week.

Thanks Josh for the info. Is there a 1.1.5 version with the revised CVS encoder in the near future, or are you perhaps planning a 1.1.4a soon? If neither, that's OK, was just curious of your release schedule plans for any upcoming FLAC updates/bugfixes.
Also any news on the Mac Universal Binary for 1.1.4 download link on your site?

the installer will be for 1.1.4 first since the next flac version is not ready yet and I'm real short on time lately.

I still need to go over all the responses to brady's mac binary. I don't have an x86 mac to test it on myself.

windows installer for 1.1.4 ready for testing: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=54439