- 10-15% decoder speedup
- 24-bit input support restored
- more robust plugins
- new metadata block for Vorbis-style tags
- vastly improved metadata editor
- new libFLAC++, a C++ object wrapper around libFLAC
- new metadata editing interface in libFLAC and libFLAC++
* both encoder and decoder are significantly faster
* flac now has gzip-like command-line usage (should be more intuitive)
* the -# options have been tweaked for efficiency; -5 is the new default
* flac now autodetects WAVE input
* flac now ignores (with warning) unsupported WAVE subchunks
* new -o and --delete-input-file options
* new SEEKTABLE metadata block for storing seek points (speeds up seeking)
flac is a free lossless audio codec. It does not compete with
MP3/OggVorbis, which are lossy compression schemes. Instead, flac
can be considered an equivalent to gzip/bzip2, optimized for audio
recordings (wav files).