fre:ac is a CD audio extractor

CD ripper

A CD ripper, CD grabber or CD extractor is software that convert tracks on a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis.It rips raw digital audio in CDDA format on a compact disc to a file or other output.- History :...

 and audio converter for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

, fre:ac is free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

. The developers invite donations but they are optional.

Features

Besides digital audio extraction fre:ac also supports converting audio files to another format. It is also possible to reencode an audio file to the same format which can be useful to convert a file to a lower bitrate

Bitrate

In telecommunications and computing, bit rate is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time....

. The program supports most important audio formats such as MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

, Ogg Vorbis, MP4/AAC

Advanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....

, WMA

Windows Media Audio

Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...

 and FLAC

FLAC

FLAC is a codec which allows digital audio to be losslessly compressed such that file size is reduced without any information being lost...

.

For CD audio extraction fre:ac makes use of the CDRip library developed in the CDex

CDex

CDex is a CD ripper for Microsoft Windows. It convert tracks on a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. Released under the GNU General Public License, CDex is free software. , it is the 14th most popular download on SourceForge.net, with over 41 million downloads. It...

 project. Therefore it supports the same error correction methods as CDex which are known as CD paranoia.

The fre:ac user interface is multilingual and can be translated using an included utility program. It is currently available in 37 languages.

During fre:ac development great importance has been attached to supporting Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

. The application supports CD information queries to the freedb

Freedb

freedb is a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB . As of April 24, 2006, the database holds just under 2,000,000 CDs...

 online CD database and can write information tags (e.g. ID3v2

ID3

ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself....

) to audio files in Unicode format. In doing so it can also convert invalid freedb entries to the correct format.

History

The first public release of BonkEnc was announced in summer of 2001 and carried the version number 0.4. The program was merely a converter at that time, purpose-built for converting audio files to the then new Bonk format. However, it also supported encoding to MP3 files already.

After several 0.x releases which added support for more audio formats and for CD audio extraction version 1.0 Beta 1 was released on July 5, 2003. This marked the official beginning of the beta phase.

On February 21, 2007 the stable version 1.0 was released.

Version 1.0.15 was released July 4, 2010 adding support for WMA encoding and decoding.

Version 1.0.16 was released August 17, 2010 and was the last release under the name BonkEnc.

Version 1.0.17 was released November 14, 2010 under the new name fre:ac .

See also

• List of free audio software