well, it looks like as of ~ a month ago, FLAC v1.1.4 was released (as of 2/13/07).
It had been ~ two years between v1.1.2 and when v1.1.3 was released, which was just back in Nov/Dec 2006
(see some discussion here:
http://taperssection.com/index.php/topic,76692.0.html regarding v1.1.3)
so, it looks like another nice and welcome round of improvements for v1.1.4
all the changes are listed at the official FLAC site (
http://flac.sourceforge.net/).
below are a few items of most interest to me:
Improved compression with no change to format or decrease in speed.Encoding and decoding speedups for all modes. Encoding at -8 is twice as fast.I'll always welcome smaller files, and quicker compression speeds, as I always compress at Level 8.
but it seems like FLAC Frontend has not yet been updated for FLAC v1.1.4. For v1.1.3, Mike Wren had a new Frontend update within a couple of weeks. so has anyone used it yet? I assume it'd be great. but I'm certainly not going to go back to DOS command line encoding. so, for me, I'll continue to use v1.1.3 until the windows GUI gets updated. but, I thought I'd start some discussion here, see if anyone's used it and to get some general thoughts from people.