FLAC Gets First Update In 6 Years 197
An anonymous reader writes "The Free Lossless Audio Codec, FLAC, loved by audiophiles for its lossless fidelity has been
updated to version 1.3.0. FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but 'lossless', meaning that audio compressed in FLAC doesn't suffer any loss in quality. FLAC v1.3.0 is the first update in almost 6 years and it is also the first release from the new Xiph.Org maintainer team."
Big new feature: ReplayGain works for sampling rates up to 192kHz so you can finally control the volume of your obsessively ripped LPs.
No updates in 6 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:lol, Xiph, like GNU Hurd (Score:5, Interesting)
ABX at 192kbps and I can't hear the difference, which is good enough for me. Granted I don't have the best ears.
I don't mean to be overly enthusiastic, it's just nice having a codec that serves basically all purposes.
I don't use it for music really. That's all in FLAC (storage) and Vorbis (players) already, but I do use it for video nowadays. I usually encode at 48kbps at 44.1kHz and it sounds better to me that AAC-HE-PS while using the same space. And it's a free and open codec too, so I have all the unjustified moral superiority to wave around too.
Re:No updates in 6 years? (Score:4, Interesting)
True. However, FLAC is extremely CPU efficient for playback (decoding).
You can find some comparisons where it performs even better than MP3 in terms of CPU usage
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=92235 [hydrogenaudio.org]
It's also more efficient than any other compressed lossless codec (note: WAV/PCM is not compressed):
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=98665 [hydrogenaudio.org]