FLAC encoder updated to 1.1.2

Josh Coalson, the official FLAC project leader and original author of the FLAC codec, has unexpectedly released a minor update of the FLAC reference library on the 5th of february.

Although according to him there’s no major change requiring to upgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2, I’ve decided to offer an upgrade for my Winamp encoder reflecting the changes. Obviously, I told you in a previous news item there was a very minor bug in the encoder which was to be fixed in an incoming version... so I’m using the pretext of a new FLAC version to update the whole package.

The changelog for the Winamp FLAC encoder is:
 upgraded to libFlac 1.1.2, implying some speed enhancements in compression levels 0, 1 and 2
 fixed bug preventing from ripping the same CD track twice (I told you before this wasn’t a bug everybody would see!)

The good news about the FLAC in-progress-work is that we might see an encoder using integer-only instructions soon. For people not familiar with integer vs float CPU instructions, just understand that dealing with integer numbers is really faster than dealing with float numbers. Currently most of the encoding process can be turned into integer-only computing, and I hope the remaining part will have its own integer version soon .

The bad news is that Josh doesn’t seem to care much more than that about the Winamp input plug-in. This one didn’t receive any update, and thus stills not working properly with Winamp 5, whereas the tags are completely broken under Windows 98/ME OSes. Contrariwise, the XMMS plug-in (XMMS is a Winamp clone for Unix/BSD/Linux) did receive some updates. That actually means I’ll have to continue maintaining my own forked version of the Winamp FLAC input plug-in for now. Worst, some strategic code I was using for the Winamp 5 interface has been pulled out of the source tree I’ll try to update the input plug-in to 1.1.2, however I can’t promise to fix the Windows 98/ME issue.