I really like FLAC Frontend as a quick little tool I can use when doing some basic WAV->FLAC conversions, it's very easy to use and fairly foolproof. Unfortunately, it's grown very long in the tooth, and has not been updated since 2003, meaning it only supports FLAC features up to 1.1.0.

Anyway, since the FLAC Frontend hasn't been updated in years, it doesn't support some of the newer features of FLAC that have been implemented since 1.1.0. The big feature in my mind that it's missing is the ability to perform operations on FLAC files, specifically adding replaygain or updating to the current FLAC version. I know these operations can be done with batch files, but even they can be inconvenient when just trying to do work with one particular FLAC album, definitely not as convenient as FLAC Frontend.

I know Speek no longer maintains his Frontends, and as far as I can tell he may have never released the source code. I am going to guess that if the source code was out there, somebody would have decided to update it at some point.

Anyway, I guess a lot of people use Foobar for easy GUI FLAC operations. I was always annoyed about Foobar because when a new version of FLAC came out, you had to wait for the Foobar version. Foobar also doesn't implement options to preserve the file date. Perhaps these things have changed since I last reviewed Foobar, does anyone know?

Reflacer also looks like it could eventually evolve into a GUI that could replace what FLAC Frontend is convenient for.

Maybe, if anything, this is more of a FLAC GUI rant. I know there are a lot of adept script writers and coders that use this forum. Are there any thoughts on the subject of FLAC's virtually non-existent GUI tools?

i could be wrong here so if i am apologies, but does the flac front end NOT encode/decode various sampling rates? i have WAVs that are above and below 44.1khz, seems like the official tool supporting high quality audio would be able to deal with this (at lease can we do something about 24/96?). it may just be my computer though, so apologies if i am in the wrong.

LOL, now that's what I call a paranoid!

I am using foobar2000 to make the transcoding (no pipe), happened to also like the command line 'flac' and 'metaflac', I place them inside the system path, so I can 'flac' or 'metaflac' from any directory.

Did you take a look at Speek's multi-front end?
I think you can add command line switches in there with all features you want for the current version. And it looks similar to FLAC FrontEnd.

Perhaps we could convince Wim aka Speek (still active on HA.org) to disclose the source code of his frondends to the public domain. If he personally does not have the time and/or the motivation to maintain them, maybe antother guy could have a look into this.

I tested with some 24/96 files and FLAC Frontend was able to decode/encode them. I did run into a problem encoding a 24/96 file when I had Replaygain enabled. Unchecking that allowed the encode to work.



The only reason I want to preserve the file date is to know when I ripped the original wavs. I guess I could always add a tag indicating that.

I forgot he had a multi-front end. I'll have to play around with that. Maybe it will work for why I opened this thread.

I tested with some 24/96 files and FLAC Frontend was able to decode/encode them. I did run into a problem encoding a 24/96 file when I had Replaygain enabled. Unchecking that allowed the encode to work.



The only reason I want to preserve the file date is to know when I ripped the original wavs. I guess I could always add a tag indicating that.

I tested Speek's multi-frontend. It did allow me to transcode flac to flac to update the version and add replay-gain. Unfortunately, it treats each file individually, therefore it won't save the album gain information the way the FLAC Frontend does. The difference seems to be that FLAC treats one command line of files as an album. FLAC Frontend has a checkbox to force it to treat all the files in one line, MultiFrontend does not seem to have an option to force that.

I just started looking into using replaygain so this definitely gives me a better understanding of how it works and perhaps why it's hard to implement in Synthetic Soul's batch file and the reflacer script.