FLAC 1.4.3 released 2023-06-23

The development for this release focused on the tools, flac and metaflac, whereas the previous few releases had the focus on libFLAC. The main improvement in flac is its handling of foreign metadata on decoding a file (i.e. restoring the foreign metadata), metaflac has had a few features added. Both tools have been vetted with fuzzing, resulting in numerous small fixes.

Package checksums (SHA-256)

• 6c58e69cd22348f441b861092b825e591d0b822e106de6eb0ee4d05d27205b70 flac-1.4.3.tar.xz
• c4558cf79fc1365d1822f7945a20bdbf55f99642cee95a823d44f3a61fb748c6 flac-1.4.3-win.zip

Changes

• 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

FLAC 1.4.2 released 2022-10-22

Like the last release, this release only has a few changes. A problem with FLAC playback in GStreamer (and possibly other libFLAC users) was the reason for the short time since the last release

Package checksums (SHA-256)

• e322d58a1f48d23d9dd38f432672865f6f79e73a6f9cc5a5f57fcaa83eb5a8e4 flac-1.4.2.tar.xz
• 2066e8adad308ec8215e65544ec761c931e4ea9fd26725ec704b2107392b7e3b flac-1.4.2-win.zip

Changes

• 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

FLAC 1.4.1 released 2022-09-22

This release fixes the release tarball (which was missing man pages and api documentation in FLAC 1.4.0) and some build problems that were found with FLAC 1.4.0

Package checksums (SHA-256)

• 91303c3e5dfde52c3e94e75976c0ab3ee14ced278ab8f60033a3a12db9209ae6 flac-1.4.1.tar.xz
• f3b5028624b87fa0b723830b6bc764f10ac57c126271cd3fa1a22e84bdadb3e6 flac-1.4.1-win.zip

Changes

• 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

FLAC 1.4.0 released 2022-09-09

This release fixes a lot of bugs found by fuzzing, and fuzzing coverage has improved much. Also, compression should be better but a little slower. Speedups for 64-bit ARM have been implemented. Encoding and decoding 32 bps PCM is now possible.

Package checksums (SHA-256)

• 34467d1466d1ff468a3217ad9e2e2d4ca12960cc13ea608dc7a5a288b5628a1e flac-1.4.0-win.zip
• af41c0733c93c237c3e52f64dd87e3b0d9af38259f1c7d11e8cbf583c48c2506 flac-1.4.0.tar.xz

Changes

As there have been changes to the library interfaces, the libFLAC version number is incremented to 12, the libFLAC++ version number is incremented to 10. As some changes were breaking, the version age numbers (see libtool versioning) have been reset to 0. For more details on the changes to the API, see the porting guide.

The XMMS plugin and 'common' plugin code (used only by the XMMS plugin) are deprecated, they will be removed in a future release.

• General:
  • It is now possible to limit the minimum bitrate of a FLAC file generated by libFLAC and with the flac tool to 1 bit/sample. This function can be used to aid live streaming, for example for internet radio
  • Encoding files with sample rates up to 1'048'575Hz is now possible. (Con Kolivas)
  • Compression of preset -3 through -8 was slightly improved at the cost of a small decrease in encoding speed by increasing the precision with which autocorrelation was calculated (Martijn van Beurden)
  • Encoding speed of preset -0, -1 and -2 was slightly improved
  • Compression of presets -1 and -4 was slighly improved on certain material by changing the adaptive mid-side heuristics
  • Speedups specifically targeting 64-bit ARMv8 devices using NEON were integrated (Ronen Gvili, Martijn van Beurden)
  • Speedups for x86_64 CPUs having the FMA instruction set extention are added
  • Encoding and decoding of 32-bit PCM is now possible
• (Ogg) FLAC format:
  • The FLAC format document is being rewritten by the IETF CELLAR working group. The latest draft can be found on https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-cellar-flac/
  • The FLAC format document specifies no bounds for the residual. In other to match current decoder implementations, it is proposed to bound the residual to the range provided by a 32-bit int signed two's complement. This limit must be checked by FLAC encoders as to keep FLAC decoders free from the complexity of being to decode a residual exceeding a 32-bit int.
  • There is now a set of files available to test whether a FLAC decoder implements the format correctly. This FLAC decoder testbench can be found at https://github.com/ietf-wg-cellar/flac-test-files. Also, results of testing hard- and software can be found here at https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=FLAC_decoder_testbench.
• flac:
  • The option --limit-min-bitrate was added to aid streaming, see github #264
  • The option --keep-foreign-metadata-if-present is added. This option works the same as --keep-foreign-metadata, but does return a warning instead of an error if no foreign metadata was found to store or restore
  • The warning returned by the foreign metadata handling is now clearer in case a user tries to restore foreign metadata of the wrong type, for example decoding a FLAC file containing AIFF foreign metadata to a WAV file
  • A problem when using the analyse function causing the first frame to have a wrong size and offset was fixed
  • Fix bug where channel mask of a file is unintentionally reused when several files are processed with one command
  • The order of compression-related commands is no longer important, i.e. -8ep gives the same result as -ep8. Previously, a compression level (like -8) would override a more specific setting (like -e or -p). This is no longer the case
  • flac now checks the block-align property of WAV files to ensure non-standard WAV files (for which flac has no handling) are not mangled
• metaflac:
  • (none)
• build system:
  • MSVC and Makefile.lite build system files have been removed. Building with MSVC (Visual Studio) can be done by using CMake
  • Various CMake improvements, especially for creating MSVC build files (Martijn van Beurden, martinRenou, CookiePLMonster, David Callu, Tyler Dunn, Cameron Cawley)
  • Various fixes for MinGW (Martijn van Beurden, Cameron Cawley)
  • Removed obsolete autotools macro's to silence warnings
  • Fixes for FreeBSD PowerPC (pkubaj)
  • Fixed some compiler warnings (Martijn van Beurden, Tyler Dunn)
  • Fix building with uclibc (Fabrice Fontaine)
• testing/validation:
  • Addition of new encoder fuzzer, adding fuzzing for 8, 24 and 32-bit inputs
  • Addition of new decoder fuzzer, adding coverage of seeking code
  • Addition of metadata fuzzer, adding coverage of metadata APIs
  • Various improvements to fuzzers to improve code coverage, fuzzing speed and stability
  • Many changes to test suite to improve cross-platform compatibility (Rosen Penev)
  • Windows CI now also builds the whole test suite
  • Clang-format file added (Rosen Penev)
  • Add warning on using v141_xp platform toolset with /MT (Martijn van Beurden, Paul Sanders)
• libraries:
  • Various seeking fixes (Martijn van Beurden, Robert Kausch)
  • Various bugs fixed found by fuzzing
  • On decoding, it is now checked whether residuals can be contained by a 32-bit int, preventing integer overflow
  • Add check that samples supplied to libFLAC actually fall within the bps set
  • Add checks when parsing metadata blocks to not allocate excessive amounts of memory and not overread
  • Undocumented Windows-only utf8 functions are no longer exported to the DLL interface
  • Removed all assembler and intrinsics code from the decoder to improve fuzzing, as they provided only a small speed benefit
  • The bitwriter buffer is limited in size to 2^24 bytes, so it cannot write excessively large files. This is a backup in case another bug in this area creeps (back) in.
  • The metadata iterations should now never return a vorbiscomment entry with NULL as an entry, now always at least an empty string is returned
• documentation:
  • Removed html documentation and generate man pages from markdown
• Interface changes:
  • libFLAC:
    • Addition of FLAC__stream_encoder_set_limit_min_bitrate() and FLAC__stream_encoder_get_limit_min_bitrate(), see github #264
    • get_client_data_from_decoder is renamed FLAC__get_decoder_client_data(), see github #124
    • All API functions taking a filename as an argument now take UTF-8 filenames on Windows, and no longer accept filenames using the current codepage
    • FLAC__Frame struct has changed: warmup samples are now stored in FLAC__int64 instead of FLAC__int32 types, and verbatim samples can now be stored in either FLAC__int32 or FLAC__int64 depending on whether samples fix the former or latter
    • The FLAC__StreamMetadata struct now has a tag, so it can be forward declared
  • libFLAC++:
    • Addition of ::set_limit_min_bitrate() and ::get_limit_min_bitrate(), see github #264
    • All API functions taking a filename as an argument now take UTF-8 filenames on Windows, and no longer accept filenames using the current codepage
    • The ::FLAC__Frame struct has changed, see the libFLAC interface change.

FLAC 1.3.4 released 2022 February 20

This release mostly fixes (security related) bugs.

When building with MSVC, using CMake is preferred, see the README under
"Building with CMake" for more information. Building with MSVC using
solution files is deprecated and these files will be removed in the future.

Package checksums

• 8ff0607e75a322dd7cd6ec48f4f225471404ae2730d0ea945127b1355155e737 flac-1.3.4.tar.xz
• 0476f66a58a2b8b411585bd61d0ae0c2a39708c325ab1c0ce92d46044676ffe1 flac-1.3.4-win.zip

Changes

General

• Fix 12 decoder bugs found by oss-fuzz, including CVE-2020-0499 (erikd, Martijn van Beurden)
• Fix encoder bug CVE-2021-0561 (NeelkamalSemwal)
• Integrate oss-fuzzers (erikd, Guido Vranken)
• Seeking fixes (NeelkamalSemwal, Robert Kausch)
• Various fixes and improvements (Andrei Astafev, Rosen Penev, Håkan Kvist, oreo639, erikd, Tamás Zahola, Ulrik Mikaelsson, Tyler Dunn, tmkk)

Format

• FLAC format
  • no changes
• Ogg FLAC format:
  • no changes

Commands

• flac:
  Various fixes and improvements (Andrei Astafev, Martijn van Beurden)
• metaflac:
  (none)

Build system

• CMake improvements (evpobr, Vitaliy Kirsanov, erikd, Ozkan Sezer, Tyler Dunn, tg-m DeadSix27, ericLemanissier, Chocobo1).
• Fixes for MinGW and MSVC (Ozkan Sezer).
• Fix for clang (Ozkan Sezer)
• Fix for PowerPC (Peter Seiderer, Thomas BERNARD)
• Fix for FreeBSD PowerPC (pkubaj).

Testing and Validation

• Add Windows target to CI, improve logging (Ralph Giles)
• CI improvements (Ralph Giles, Ewout ter Hoeven)

Documentation

• Doxygen fixes (Tyler Dunn)
• Fix typos (Tim Gates, maxz)

Library interface changes

• libFLAC:
  • (none)
• libFLAC++:
  • (none)

Special thanks to Martijn van Beurden for helping prepare this release.

FLAC 1.3.3 released 2019 August 4

Checksums

213e82bd716c9de6db2f98bcadbc4c24c7e2efe8c75939a1a84e28539c4e1748 flac-1.3.3.tar.xz

Changes

General

• Fix CPU detection (Janne Hyvärinen).
• Switch from unsigned types to uint32_t (erikd).
• CppCheck fixes (erikd).
• Improve SIMD decoding of 24 bit files (lvqcl).
• POWER* amnd POWER9 improvements (Anton Blanchard).
• More tests.

Format

• FLAC format

  • no changes

• Ogg FLAC format:

  • no changes

Commands

• flac:
  • When converting to WAV, use WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE when bits per second is not 8 or 16 (erikd).
  • Fix --output-prefix with input-files in sub-directories (orbea).
• metaflac:
  • (none)
• Plugins:
  • (none)

Build system

• Cmake support (Vitaliy Kirsanov, evpobr).
• Visual Studio updates (Janne Hyvärinen).
• Fix for MSVC when UNICODE is enabled (lvqcl).
• Fix for OpenBSD/i386 (Christian Weisgerber).

Documentation

• (none)

Library interface changes

• libFLAC:
  • (none)
• libFLAC++:
  • (none)