Introduction

What’s FLAC?

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC is an audio compression codec that is lossless. Unlike lossy codecs such as MP3 and Vorbis, it does not remove any information from the audio stream.

A slightly longer introduction on the FLAC format is available at this page.

The official FLAC plug-in

The official FLAC project developped an input plug-in for Winamp. It includes every possible features we could expect from a Winamp 2 plug-in. notably:
 native FLAC files playback (!!)
 individual meta-data editor
 replaygain support
 FLAC plugin exclusive title formatting

My modifications

One may have seen that Winamp 5 introduced some new exiting features, notably around meta-data handling through the media library. This include meta-data browsing, dynamic views, mass tagging or the CD ripping engine.

However, such advanced new features requires extending the old Winamp 2 plugin interface, by providing support for meta-data management.

My FLAC input plug-in artwork

This is the purpose of my modifications against the official FLAC plugin. I managed to extend the plug-in to turn it into a full Winamp 5 friendly plug-in. Resulting to these further developments, my modified FLAC plug-in allows:
 to tag FLAC files newly created with my Winamp FLAC encoder: this was my first motivation to work on the plug-in;
 to import FLAC meta-data into the media library;
 to use the mass-taging library editor;
 to use application-wide titles formatting (instead of plug-in specific formatting options);
 to use any other features which would rely on meta-data handling.

In addition to that, I took advantage of this work to fix a couple of minor bugs which used to be here for a long time. Users will be happy to learn that in_flac no longer heavily stress the Winamp’s UI as it used to, or that it is now compatible with third-party plug-ins requiring song change notifications (such as the popular Toaster plug-in).