A Modest Construct

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the world of digital audio: Hydrogen Audio is even more abuzz than normal.

Exact Audio Copy v0.99 prebeta 1

André has released a new version of Exact Audio Copy. A high-level changelog is as follows:

• Better AccurateRip support (reading ranges and CD images)
• Improved log file output
• Flac encoder now comes with EAC
• Much improved configuration wizard
• Writing CD-Text using CDRDAO
• Copy and test range
• Added writing new tags for ID3V2 like duration, encoder settings and the CD TOC
• Correction of Xing header after writing ID3V2
• Drive options are now stored by the drive name and not by adapter and LUN
• Fixed many issues and bugs

It’s also sporting a new Vista-compatible icon that I made.

WavPack 4.41.0

Although this was technically released in May, I haven’t gotten around to talking about it.

• Speed improvements of from 10% to 30% depending on mode and CPU (includes MMX intrinsics for stereo 24-bit / 32-bit encoding)
• Added --skip and --until commands to unpack specified range of audio data
• Fixed corrupt floating-point operation on big-endian CPUs
• Complete changelog here

I can verify that the new one is much faster. I even flirted with the idea of converting my lossless collection to WavPack instead of FLAC, but WavPack has no easy way of upgrading from version to version (FLAC, meanwhile, now has the --force switch).

FLAC 1.2.0

In the latest of a blisteringly-fast series of releases, Josh Coalson officially released FLAC 1.2.0, after a 4.5-year run for the 1.1.x series.

• General:
  • Small encoding speedups for all modes.
• FLAC format:
  • One of the reserved bits in the FLAC frame header has been assigned for future use; make sure to refer to the porting guide if you parse FLAC streams manually.
• Ogg FLAC format:
  • (none)
• flac:
  • Added runtime detection of SSE OS support for most operating systems.
  • Added a new undocumented option --ignore-chunk-sizes for ignoring the size of the ‘data’ chunk (WAVE) or ‘SSND’ chunk (AIFF). Can be used to encode files with bogus data sizes (e.g. with WAV files piped from foobar2000 to flac.exe as an external encoder). Use with caution: all subsequent data is treated as audio, so the data/SSND chunk must be the last or the following data/tags will be treated as audio and encoded.
• metaflac:
  • (none)
• plugins:
  • (none)
• build system:
  • Added solution and project files for building with VC++ 2005.
• libraries:
  • Added runtime detection of SSE OS support for most operating systems.
  • Fixed bug where invalid seek tables could cause some seeks to fail.
• Interface changes (see also the porting guide for specific instructions on porting to FLAC 1.2.0):
  • libFLAC:
    • Added FLAC__format_sample_rate_is_subset()
  • libFLAC++:
    • Added FLAC::Decoder::Stream::get_decode_position()

FLAC 1.2.0’s compression doesn’t differ by a single byte, but as mentioned, there are minor speed increases, and this release paves the way for future compression improvements. It’s not the sort of release that will require you to update your collections immediately, but for firmware and software writers, this is the warning shot: changes are coming.

See the corresponding Hydrogen Audio thread for followup information.

True Audio (TTA)

Although no one really knows about it or uses it, there’s another open-source lossless audio codec called True Audio, and though I thought the project was dead, it just released a new version, namely v3.4, which was immediately followed up with a v3.4.1 to incorporate a patch relating to piping.

New in this release are: support for standard input/output interface; minor changes in command line options and error messages; small bug fixes, and cosmetic changes, speed optimization; code changes necessary to support 64bit architectures; changes related to compilation under MinGW gcc (windows)

Also see the corresponding HydrogenAudio thread.

Ogg Vorbis 1.2.0

The long-languishing Ogg Vorbis codec recently saw a version updated (from 1.1.2 to 1.2.0), but it sadly has nothing to do with audio tuning. Rather, it fixes a critical security bug and does some other minor changes.

libvorbis 1.2.0 (2007-07-25) — “Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20070622″

• new ov_fopen() convenience call that avoids the common stdio conflicts with ov_open() and MSVC runtimes.
• libvorbisfile now handles multiplexed streams
• improve robustness to corrupt input streams
• fix a minor encoder bug
• updated RTP draft
• build system updates
• minor corrections to the specification

Supposedly, Monty will be folding in the ever-popular aoTuV tunings in the near future.

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