Nine years later, since the publication of the last significant branch, the community Xiph.org presented a new version of the free codec flac 1.4.0 , which provides sound coding without loss of quality. FLAC uses only coding methods without discarding data (Lossless), which guarantees the full preservation of the original quality of the sound flow and its identity with a reference option subjected to encoding. At the same time, the compression methods used without loss reduce the size of the original sound flow by 50-60%. FLAC is a completely free streaming format that implies not only the openness of libraries with the implementation of coding and decoding functions, but also the lack of restrictions on the use of specifications and the creation of derivatives of options.
of the most important changes can be noted:
- Added support for coding and decoding with a bit of quantization of 32 bits to sample ( BIT-PER-SAMPLE ).
- Increased compression efficiency at levels from 3 to 8, at the cost of a slight decrease in the coding rate due to increasing the accuracy of calculating auto-correction. The coding speed for levels 0, 1 and 2. The compression at levels from 1 to 4 due to changes in adaptive heuristics is slightly improved.
- The compression rate on 64-bit processors ARMV8 is significantly increased, due to the use of Neon instructions. Increased performance on X86_64 processors supporting the set of instructions FMA.
- API and ABI Libflac and Libflac ++ libraries have been changed (when updating to version 1.4, applications react is required).
- declared outdated and will be removed in the next issue of the plugin for XMMS.
- Libflac library and FLAC utility are given the ability to limit the minimum bitrate for FLAC files, up to 1 bit for a sample (may be useful when organizing Live broadcasting).
- It became possible to encode files with a sampling frequency up to 1048575 Hz.
- FLAC utility implemented new options “-Limit-Min-Litrate” and “–keep-Foreign-metadata-maf-Pressent”.