FLAC 1.1.4 is released; the Sourceforge shell server is down so I can't update the web page, but downloads are here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13478 The windows installer for 1.1.4 is not ready yet but should be along soon. If needed you can replace the binaries from the current (1.1.3) installer with the ones in the 1.1.4 .zip on sourceforge. The main features of this release: - Compression improvements in all modes (-0 .. -8) with no change to the format or decrease in speed - Speed increases for all modes, both encoding and decoding. Encoding at -8 is twice as fast as in 1.1.3 - New --warnings-as-errors option for flac - Simpler alternative form for --picture/--import-picture-from options - Several bug fixes (apodization locale bug, FLAC-to-FLAC transcoding) - Reduced memory requirements The complete changelog is at http://flac.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/flac/flac/doc/html/changelog.html Developers will be happy to know the API is unchanged! Embedded developers will probably see the greatest speed gains. The improvements are all algorithmic and at the C level. Prior to 1.1.4, the bitbuffer in libFLAC was a single FIFO module and processed all data as bytes. For FLAC 1.1.4, the bitbuffer has been completely rewritten to use the native machine word size. Also, it is fastest on big-endian architectures. For those reasons, big-endian CPUs with slow byte-ops should see a significant speed increase. The bitbuffer has also been split into a separate bitwriter and bitreader, which makes it easier to simplify libFLAC by removing encoding support. The current comparison page shows the results of the speed increases and compression improvements: http://flac.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/flac/flac/doc/html/comparison.html Josh ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/ _______________________________________________ Flac mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac
