Topic: CD Wave/FLAC vulnerability fix

[boojum]

There has been discussion of the possibility of a FLAC file be used to compromise a computer.  FLAC 1.2.1 fixed that.  It can be retrofitted to CD Wave, as indicated by the author:

"Hello,

I've done a quick test and 1.2.1 seems compatible with CD Wave. You can use it already by downloading  "flac-1.2.1-devel-win.zip" from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13478
Extract the "libFLAC.dll" file into the CD Wave directory (where it replaces the existing one) and CD Wave will use the new version.

The next release will include this library."

[Gordon]

so that should mean that we will get better compression as well when using cd wave to flac.  it was using a very old version.

[JasonSobel]

so that should mean that we will get better compression as well when using cd wave to flac.  it was using a very old version.

well, the current version of CD Wave had upgraded the FLAC version from v1.1.0 (released in Jan '03) to v1.1.4 (released Feb '07).  So if you're using the current version of CD Wave, the FLAC version isn't too old.  That said, there are many good reasons to update FLAC to v1.2.1

[boojum]

The author and others admit that the additional compression improvement is negligible.  The improvement is in compression speed.  These files get shrunk a lot more quickly now.  That works for me.

Cheers

[JasonSobel]

I agree that the additional compression is minor for 16 bit files.  However, with 24 bit files, the difference is much larger.  I've downloaded 24 bit file sets from etree, seen that they were compressed with an older version of FLAC, then gone FLAC > WAV > FLAC v1.2.1, and I've seen file size savings of hundreds of MB.  In one case, a YMSB show that was originally comrpessed with v1.1.0 (what CD Wave used to use until the most recent version), it was a ~700 MB difference across the whole show.  Certainly not what I would call negligible.

[boojum]

^^^ I did not know about the greater space savings in 24 bit compression.  No, that is not negligible.  Thanks for pointing that out.