Major release 1.1.3 of FLAC [LWN.net]

FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio CODEC, is an audio coder/decoder application. The FLAC features document has this description:

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC formatted audio files are supported by a long list of software applications on many operating system platforms. FLAC is also supported by Rockbox, an open-source firmware replacement for portable music players. [FLAC]

FLAC can be used to compress common .wav files by a 2:1 ratio. Your author has used FLAC to work on an audio archiving project, as described in this article.

Version 1.1.3 of FLAC was recently announced:

Almost 2 years in the making, FLAC 1.1.3 is a major release with improved compression, improved cover art and multichannel support, better recovery for corrupted files, many new features and options in the command-line tools, and several bug fixes. For developers, the decoder and encoder APIs have also been simplified and there is a new porting guide.

The changelog lists the latest improvements, including:

The compression algorithm has been improved without changing the file format.
Recovery when dealing with corrupted files is better.
multi-channel support is improved.
The encoder now supports transcoding of FLAC data into Ogg FLAC encapsulation.
It is now possible to encode pictures, such as album art, into a flac file.
The options --picture, --import-picture-from and --export-picture-to have been added.
A new REPLAYGAIN_REFERENCE_LOUDNESS tag has been added for setting playback levels.
The frame header definition adds new definitions for multiple-speakers.
The FLAC subset has new restrictions added for processing efficiency.
The flac decoder adds a -F option for dealing with corrupted files.
WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE .wav files can now be encoded and decoded.
multi-channel AIFF and WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE files are properly handled.
A --tag-from-file option has been added for importing cuesheets as a tag.
The --apodization option is available for specifying LPC analysis window functions.
Encoding of non-compressed AIFF-C data is now supported.
metaflac adds support for read-only operations on Ogg FLAC files.
The developer libraries and associated APIs have been simplified.
Numerous bugs have been fixed.

The FLAC project has stayed true to its project goals statement, the new features look like useful additions and the API simplification effort should be helpful to developers of new software. Flac source code and package files are available here.

Major release 1.1.3 of FLAC

Posted Dec 7, 2006 10:41 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

In my experience 2:1 is the average compression ratio for `noisy' stuff like rock music recordings. I regularly see ratios of 3:1 for orchestral work and between 4:1 and 5:1 with things like piano sonatas.

(The best I've ever seen outside of contrived tests was an 8:1 ratio for part of a recording of the Well-Tempered Clavier.)

Major release 1.1.3 of FLAC

Posted Dec 7, 2006 10:43 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ogg FLAC encapsulation has long been available. What's changed is that the encoder can now transcode native FLAC into Ogg FLAC. (Of course because FLAC is lossless you could always do this by unflaccing and reflaccing again, but that's far more expensive than a transcode.)

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 10:59 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (11 responses)

What CD ripper do you use, with WAV->FLAC encoding, that adds Vorbis comments to the FLAC files? I.e., it should add information about artist, disktitle, track number and title, etc., from freedb to the files.

Any recommendations? GNOME/KDE/native X doesn't matter, as long as it's stable.

Best, Joachim

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 13:40 UTC (Thu) by ChristopheC (guest, #28570) [Link] (1 responses)

Is a command-line tool acceptable for you ?

I use abcde :
http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/ (old page)
http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/abcde.php
(new page, actually not up-to-date either)

abcde

Posted Dec 11, 2006 23:21 UTC (Mon) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

Not to sound too much like an AOL user from 1996, but "me too".

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 13:49 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Sound Juicer, standard GNOME ripper. I occasionally edit tags using Ex Falso.

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 14:09 UTC (Thu) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link] (2 responses)

Kaudiocreator I have ripped loads of CD with no problems.

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 14:43 UTC (Thu) by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250) [Link]

Ditto... 600+ CDs ripped using kaudiocreator into FLAC files with no troubles at all.

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 14:56 UTC (Thu) by jongeek (guest, #39233) [Link]

Another vote for kaudiocreator. Works great out of the box, and also easy to configure; i.e., change flac encoder options, encoded file names, album and track info, etc.

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 7, 2006 23:14 UTC (Thu) by Necronom (guest, #22645) [Link] (2 responses)

My current favourite mechanism is to backup entire cds to flac, and encode the cue sheets into the flac. You can then recreate the cd.

Once you have encoded the cue sheet into the flac, run flactag (www.gently.org.uk/flactag/), and load metadata out of Musicbrainz.

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 8, 2006 1:19 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (1 responses)

And how do you play one song of such a big FLAC file? Which media player supports that? I've started to use amarok, which seems to be halfway decent, but I haven't seen any cue that it supports this mode.

Joachim

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 12, 2006 11:46 UTC (Tue) by adhawkins (guest, #1877) [Link]

I play my collection (primarily ripped into a single FLAC file with embedded CUE sheet) using Slimdevices SlimServer software. You can play to any standard media player software (as long as it can attach to an MP3 stream) or use their free software player. There's also a hardware player that is very good.

Andy

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 8, 2006 4:20 UTC (Fri) by omez (guest, #6904) [Link]

I've used grip for years with success. It's a thin layer over the command line interfaces of the ripping and compression programs that it employs (cdparanoia and flac, among others). So, you get the flexibility of access to the parameters passed to each program with an simple, pointy-clicky interface. It can keep multiple CPUs/cores busy with compression processes, too.

Some words of caution, if the paranoia setting for the ripping process is set too high and the disk too damaged, cdparanoia may hang trying to read a scratch. When this occurs, not only does grip and the other associated processes get bungled, but the cd reader may also get wedged. This is resolved by rebooting the machine.

Other times, cdparanoia gives up trying to rip a track. Grip continues to rip the rest of the disk without providing notification of the failure. You may not notice until you review the contents of the destination directory. (Hint: prepending the track number to the filename helps... except when the last n tracks are all skipped.)

FLAC - Which CD ripper to use under Linux?

Posted Dec 12, 2006 13:11 UTC (Tue) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Thanks for the hints. For the archives, I looked at the various recommendations; I use SUSE 10.0.

abcde works fine, but needs effort for configuration of file names.
Sound Juicer: It's nice that musicbrainz tags are incorporated as comments. There is no possibility to create a playlist immediately during ripping, one must do this later by another tool. There is no obvious method to map national characters (e.g., German umlauts) in filenames to ASCII chars, UTF-8 is used as representation. The access rights are restrictive beyond my umask and cannot be configured, all ripped tracks get 640.
kaudiocreator: File name mapping possibility is not sufficient, one regexp doesn't cut it. Locale setting is used to represent national characters in file names.
Storing the complete CD in one file is cool, but many media players can not cope with it.
grip doesn't add Vorbis comments. One may surely configure it to do so, but I was looking for a ready-to-run version.

k3b can rip and encode as well, as I've seen in the mean time. No filename mapping either, though. As I'm using it anyhow to write CDs, this might be a possibility.

KDE applications sometimes block almost all I/O on my systems while they poll the CD actively. That happens after I've inserted a new CD and I cannot work for a few minutes until everything normalizes again. If a CD is not inserted, I get syslog messages almost every second; very annyoing. Also annoying are the thousands of syslog messages during every rip, but this is a known problem between the cdparanoia shared libs and the Linux kernel, though without available updates for my SUSE installation. :-(

I hope this interests anybody, Joachim