[Flac] FLAC 1.1.4 released

[Josh Coalson]

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



 
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