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FLAC Changelog

What's new in FLAC 1.4.3 (23.06.2023)

Jun 23, 2023
  • General:
  • All PowerPC-specific code has been removed, as it turned out those improvements didn’t actually improve anything
  • Large improvements in encoder speed for all presets. The largest change is for the fastest presets and for 24-bit and 32-bit inputs.
  • Small improvement in decoder speed for BMI2-capable CPUs
  • Various documentation fixes and cleanups (Mark Grassi, Jake Schmidt)
  • Various fixes (Ozkan Sezer, Zhipeng Xue, orbea, Sam James, Harish Mahendrakar)
  • Fix building on Universal Windows Platform (Dmitry Kostjučenko)
  • flac
  • A lot of small fixes for bugs found by fuzzing
  • Various improvements to the –keep-foreign-metadata and –keep-foreign-metadata-if-present options on decoding
  • The output format (WAV/AIFF/RF64 etc.) is now automatically selected based on what kind of foreign metadata is stored
  • Decoded file is checked afterwards, to see whether stored foreign format data agrees with FLAC audio properties
  • AIFF-C sowt data can now be restored
  • Add –force-legacy-wave-format option, to decode to WAV with WAVEFORMATPCM where WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE would be more appropriate
  • Add –force-aiff-c-none-format and –force-aiff-c-sowt-format to decode to AIFF-C
  • The storage of WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE_CHANNEL_MASK is no longer restricted to known channel orderings
  • Throw an error when WAV or AIFF files are over 4GiB in length and the –ignore-chunk-sizes option is not set
  • Warn on testing files when ID3v2 tags are found
  • Warn when data trails the audio data of a WAV/AIFF/RF64/W64 file
  • Fix output file not being deleted after error on Windows
  • Removal of the –sector–align option
  • metaflac:
  • A lot of small fixes for bugs found by fuzzing
  • Added options –append and –data-format, which makes it possible to copy metadata blocks from one FLAC file to another
  • Added option –remove-all-tags-except
  • Added option –show-all-tags (harridu, Martijn van Beurden)
  • libFLAC:
  • No longer write seektables to Ogg, even when specifically asked for. Seektables in Ogg are not defined
  • Add functions FLAC__metadata_object_set_raw and FLAC__metadata_object_get_raw to convert between blob and FLAC__StreamMetadata
  • Build system:
  • Autoconf (configure):
  • The option –enable-64-bit-words is now on by default
  • CMake:
  • The option ENABLE_64_BIT_WORDS is now on by default
  • Testing/validation:
  • Fuzzers were added for the flac and metaflac command line tools
  • Fuzzer coverage was improved

New in FLAC 1.4.2 (21.10.2022) (Oct 23, 2022)

  • General:
  • Remove xmms plugin (Martijn van Beurden, TokyoBlackHole)
  • Remove all pure assembler, removing build dependency on nasm
  • Made console output more uniform across different platforms and CPUs
  • Improve ability to tune compile for a certain system (for example with -march=native) when combining with –disable-asm-optimizations: plain C functions can now be better optimized
  • Build system:
  • Default CFLAGS are now prepended instead of dropped when user CFLAGS are set
  • msse2 is no longer added by default (was only applicable to x86)
  • Fix cross-compiling and out-of-tree building when pandoc and doxygen are not available
  • Fix issue with Clang not compiling functions with intrinsics
  • Fix detection of bswap intrinsics (Ozkan Sezer)
  • Improve search for libssp on MinGW (Ozkan Sezer, Martijn van Beurden)
  • libFLAC:
  • Fix issue when the libFLAC user seeks in a file instead of libFLAC itself

New in FLAC 1.4.1 (22.09.2022) (Sep 23, 2022)

  • CMake fixes (Tomasz Kłoczko)
  • Add checks that man pages and api docs end up in tarball
  • Enable installation of prebuilt man pages and api docs
  • Fix compiler warnings (Johannes Kauffmann, Ozkan Sezer)
  • Fix format specifier (manxorist)
  • Enable building on Universal Windows Platform (Steve Lhomme)
  • Fix versioning from git

New in FLAC 1.3.2 (Jan 5, 2017)

  • GENERAL:
  • Fix undefined behaviour using GCC/Clang UBSAN (erikd).
  • General hardening via fuzz testing with AFL (erikd and others).
  • General code improvements (lvqcl, erikd and others).
  • Add FLAC in MP4 specification docs (Ralph Giles).
  • MSVS build cleanups (lvqcl).
  • Fix some cppcheck warnings (erikd).
  • Assume all currently used OSes support SSE2.
  • FLAC:
  • Fix potential infinite loop on flac-to-flac conversion (erikd).
  • Add WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE to WAV (as needed) when decoding (lvqcl).
  • Only write vorbis-comments if they are non-empty.
  • Error out if decoding RAW with bits != (8|16|24).
  • METAFLAC:
  • Add --scan-replay-gain option.
  • Build System:
  • Fixes for MSVC and Makefile.lite build systems.
  • LIBRARIES:
  • CPU detection cleanup and fixes (Julian Calaby, erikd and lvqcl).
  • Fix two stream decoder bugs (Max Kellermann).
  • Fix a NULL dereference bug (on a malformed file).
  • Changed the LPC order guess for a slight compression improvement, particularly for classical music (Martijn van Beurden).
  • Improved encoding speed on older Intel CPUs.
  • Fixed a seeking bug when decoding certain files (Miroslav Lichvar).
  • Put an upper bound (32768) on the number of seek points.
  • Fix potential memory leaks.
  • Support 64bit brword/bwword allowing FLAC__BYTES_PER_WORD to be set to 8 (disabled by default).
  • Fix an out-of-bounds heap read.
  • Win32: Only use large buffers when writing to disk.

New in FLAC 1.3.1 (Mar 27, 2015)

  • General:
  • Improved decoding efficiency of all bit depths but especially so for 24 bits for IA32 architecture.
  • Faster encoding using SSE and AVX (lvqcl).
  • Fixed bartlett, bartlett_hann and triangle functions.
  • New apodization functions partial_tukey and punchout_tukey for improved compression
  • Retuned compression presets to incorporate new apodization functions
  • Fix -Wcast-align warnings on armhf architecture .
  • Ogg FLAC format:
  • (none)
  • flac:
  • Help output documentation improvements.
  • I/O buffering improvements on Windows to reduce disk fragmentation when writing files.
  • Only write vorbis-comments if they are non-empty.
  • plugins:
  • Fix symbol visibility in XMMS plugin.
  • build system:
  • Many fixes and improvements across all the build systems.
  • documentation:
  • Document new apodization windows.
  • libraries:
  • Fix CVE-2014-9028 (heap write overflow) and CVE-2014-8962 (heap read overflow)

New in FLAC 1.3.0 (Mar 27, 2015)

  • General:
  • Move development to Xiph.org git repository.
  • The --sector-align option of flac has been deprecated and may not exist in future versions. shntool provides similar functionality.
  • Support for the RF64 and Wave64 formats in flac (see below).
  • Better handling of cuesheets with non-CD-DA sample rates.
  • The --ignore-chunk-sizes option has been added to the flac command line tool.
  • flac:
  • Added support for encoding from and decoding to the RF64 format, and a new corresponding option --force-rf64-format. (SF #1762502). --keep-foreign-metadata is also supported.
  • Added support for encoding from and decoding to the Sony Wave64 format, and a new corresponding option --force-wave64-format. (SF #1769582). --keep-foreign-metadata is also supported.
  • Added new options --preserve-modtime and --no-preserve-modtime to specify whether or not output files should copy the timestamp and permissions from their input files. The default is --preserve-modtime as in previous versions. (SF #1805428).
  • Allow MM:SS:FF and MM:SS.SS time formats in non-CD-DA cuesheets. (SF #1947353, SF #2182432)
  • The --sector-align option of flac has been deprecated and may not exist in future versions. shntool provides similar functionality. (SF #1805946)
  • Improved error message when user attempts to decode a non-FLAC file (SF #2222789).
  • Fix bug where flac was disallowing use of --replay-gain when encoding from stdin (SF #1840124).
  • Fix bug with fractional seconds on some locales (SF #1815517, SF #1858012).
  • Read and write appropriate channel masks for 6.1 and 7.1 surround input WAV files. Documentation was also updated.
  • Correct Wave64 GUIDs.
  • Support 56kHz to 192kHz gain analysis (patch from Earl Chew)
  • Add ability to handle unicode filenames on Windows (large set of patches from Janne Hyvärinen)
  • metaflac:
  • Allow MM:SS:FF and MM:SS.SS time formats in non-CD-DA cuesheets. (SF #1947353, SF #2182432)
  • plugins:
  • Minor updates for XMMS plugin.
  • Winamp2 plugin was dropped because Nullsoft has provided native FLAC support since 2006.
  • build system:
  • Fixes for autotools (including SF #1859664).
  • Fixes for MinGW (including SF #2000973, SF #2209829).
  • Fixes for gcc (including SF #1834168, SF #2002481).
  • Fixes for Sun Studio/Forte (SF #1701960).
  • Fixes for windows builds (including SF #1676822, SF #1756624, SF #1809863, SF #1911149).
  • Fixes for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
  • Compile with GNU gcc _FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 and stack protection where those features are detected.
  • Enable a bunch of GCC compiler warnings and fix code that generates warnings.
  • documentation:
  • Document --ignore-chunk-sizes and --apply-replaygain-which-is-not-lossless option for flac.
  • libraries:
  • libFLAC encoder was defaulting to level 0 compression instead of 5 (SF #1816825).
  • Fix bug in bitreader handling of read callback returning a short count (SF #2490454).
  • Improve decoder's ability to distinguish between a FLAC sync code and an MPEG one (SF #2491433).
  • Interface changes:
  • libFLAC:
  • Added FLAC__format_blocksize_is_subset()
  • libFLAC++:
  • Add a number of convienience methods.

New in FLAC 1.2.1b (Sep 18, 2007)

  • With the new --keep-foreign-metadata in flac, non-audio RIFF and AIFF chunks can be stored in FLAC files and recreated when decoding. This allows, among other, things support for archiving BWF files and other WAVE files from editing tools that preserves all the metadata.
  • Added a new option --no-utf8-convert which works like it does in metaflac
  • Added a new option --keep-foreign-metadata which can save/restore RIFF and AIFF chunks to/from FLAC files
  • Changed default extension for Ogg FLAC from .ogg to .oga, according to new Xiph specification
  • Fixed bug where encoding from stdin on Windows could fail if WAVE/AIFF contained unknown chunks
  • Fixed bug where importing non-CDDA cuesheets would cause an invalid lead-out track number
  • New configure option --disable-cpplibs to prevent building libFLAC
  • Fixed bug compiling flac without Ogg support
  • Fixed bug where sometimes an existing installation of flac could interfere with the build process OS X fixes
  • MinGW fixes
  • Solaris 10 fixes
  • OS/2 fixes
  • automake-1.10 fixes

New in FLAC 1.2.0a (Jul 25, 2007)

  • General:
  • Small encoding speedups for all modes.
  • FLAC format:
  • One of the reserved bits in the FLAC frame header has been assigned for future use; make sure to refer to the porting guide if you parse FLAC streams manually.
  • Ogg FLAC format:
  • (none)
  • flac:
  • Added runtime detection of SSE OS support for most operating systems.
  • Added a new undocumented option --ignore-chunk-sizes for ignoring the size of the 'data' chunk (WAVE) or 'SSND' chunk (AIFF). Can be used to encode files with bogus data sizes (e.g. with WAV files piped from foobar2000 to flac.exe as an external encoder). Use with caution: all subsequent data is treated as audio, so the data/SSND chunk must be the last or the following data/tags will be treated as audio and encoded.
  • metaflac:
  • (none)
  • plugins:
  • (none)
  • build system:
  • Added solution and project files for building with VC 2005.
  • libraries:
  • Added runtime detection of SSE OS support for most operating systems.
  • Fixed bug where invalid seek tables could cause some seeks to fail.
  • Interface changes (see also the porting guide for specific instructions on porting to FLAC 1.2.0):
  • libFLAC:
  • Added FLAC__format_sample_rate_is_subset()
  • libFLAC :
  • Added FLAC::Decoder::Stream::get_decode_position()