/* FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

* Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Josh Coalson

* Copyright (C) 2011-2013 Xiph.Org Foundation

*

* This file is part the FLAC project. FLAC is comprised of several

* components distributed under different licenses. The codec libraries

* are distributed under Xiph.Org's BSD-like license (see the file

* COPYING.Xiph in this distribution). All other programs, libraries, and

* plugins are distributed under the LGPL or GPL (see COPYING.LGPL and

* COPYING.GPL). The documentation is distributed under the Gnu FDL (see

* COPYING.FDL). Each file in the FLAC distribution contains at the top the

* terms under which it may be distributed.

*

* Since this particular file is relevant to all components of FLAC,

* it may be distributed under the Xiph.Org license, which is the least

* restrictive of those mentioned above. See the file COPYING.Xiph in this

* distribution.

*/

FLAC is an Open Source lossless audio codec developed by Josh Coalson from 2001

to 2009.

From January 2012 FLAC is being maintained by Erik de Castro Lopo under the

auspices of the Xiph.org Foundation.

FLAC is comprised of

* `libFLAC', a library which implements reference encoders and

decoders for native FLAC and Ogg FLAC, and a metadata interface

* `libFLAC++', a C++ object wrapper library around libFLAC

* `flac', a command-line program for encoding and decoding files

* `metaflac', a command-line program for viewing and editing FLAC

metadata

* player plugins for XMMS and Winamp

* user and API documentation

The libraries (libFLAC, libFLAC++) are

licensed under Xiph.org's BSD-like license (see COPYING.Xiph). All other

programs and plugins are licensed under the GNU General Public License

(see COPYING.GPL). The documentation is licensed under the GNU Free

Documentation License (see COPYING.FDL).

===============================================================================

FLAC - 1.3.0 - Contents

===============================================================================

- Introduction

- Prerequisites

- Note to embedded developers

- Building in a GNU environment

- Building with Makefile.lite

- Building with MSVC

- Building on Mac OS X

===============================================================================

Introduction

===============================================================================

This is the source release for the FLAC project. See

doc/html/index.html

for full documentation.

A brief description of the directory tree:

doc/ the HTML documentation

include/ public include files for libFLAC and libFLAC++

man/ the man page for `flac'

src/ the source code and private headers

test/ the test scripts

===============================================================================

Prerequisites

===============================================================================

To build FLAC with support for Ogg FLAC you must have built and installed

libogg according to the specific instructions below. You must have

libogg 1.1.2 or greater, or there will be seeking problems with Ogg FLAC.

If you are building on x86 and want the assembly optimizations, you will

need to have NASM >= 0.98.30 installed according to the specific instructions

below.

===============================================================================

Note to embedded developers

===============================================================================

libFLAC has grown larger over time as more functionality has been

included, but much of it may be unnecessary for a particular embedded

implementation. Unused parts may be pruned by some simple editing of

configure.ac and src/libFLAC/Makefile.am; the following dependency

graph shows which modules may be pruned without breaking things

further down:

metadata.h

stream_decoder.h

format.h

stream_encoder.h

stream_decoder.h

format.h

stream_decoder.h

format.h

In other words, for pure decoding applications, both the stream encoder

and metadata editing interfaces can be safely removed.

There is a section dedicated to embedded use in the libFLAC API

HTML documentation (see doc/html/api/index.html).

Also, there are several places in the libFLAC code with comments marked

with "OPT:" where a #define can be changed to enable code that might be

faster on a specific platform. Experimenting with these can yield faster

binaries.

===============================================================================

Building in a GNU environment

===============================================================================

FLAC uses autoconf and libtool for configuring and building.

Better documentation for these will be forthcoming, but in

general, this should work:

./configure && make && make check && make install

The 'make check' step is optional; omit it to skip all the tests,

which can take several hours and use around 70-80 megs of disk space.

Even though it will stop with an explicit message on any failure, it

does print out a lot of stuff so you might want to capture the output

to a file if you're having a problem. Also, don't run 'make check'

as root because it confuses some of the tests.

NOTE: Despite our best efforts it's entirely possible to have

problems when using older versions of autoconf, automake, or

libtool. If you have the latest versions and still can't get it

to work, see the next section on Makefile.lite.

There are a few FLAC-specific arguments you can give to

`configure':

--enable-debug : Builds everything with debug symbols and some

extra (and more verbose) error checking.

--disable-asm-optimizations : Disables the compilation of the

assembly routines. Many routines have assembly versions for

speed and `configure' is pretty good about knowing what is

supported, but you can use this option to build only from the

C sources. May be necessary for building on OS X (Intel)

--enable-sse : If you are building for an x86 CPU that supports

SSE instructions, you can enable some of the faster routines

if your operating system also supports SSE instructions. flac

can tell if the CPU supports the instructions but currently has

no way to test if the OS does, so if it does, you must pass

this argument to configure to use the SSE routines. If flac

crashes when built with this option you will have to go back and

configure without --enable-sse. Note that

--disable-asm-optimizations implies --disable-sse.

--enable-local-xmms-plugin : Installs the FLAC XMMS plugin in

$HOME/.xmms/Plugins, instead of the global XMMS plugin area

(usually /usr/lib/xmms/Input).

--with-ogg=

--with-xmms-prefix=

--with-libiconv-prefix=

Use these if you have these packages but configure can't find them.

If you want to build completely from scratch (i.e. starting with just

configure.ac and Makefile.am) you should be able to just run 'autogen.sh'

but make sure and read the comments in that file first.

===============================================================================

Building with Makefile.lite

===============================================================================

There is a more lightweight build system for do-it-yourself-ers.

It is also useful if configure isn't working, which may be the

case since lately we've had some problems with different versions

of automake and libtool. The Makefile.lite system should work

on GNU systems with few or no adjustments.

From the top level just 'make -f Makefile.lite'. You can

specify zero or one optional target from 'release', 'debug',

'test', or 'clean'. The default is 'release'. There is no

'install' target but everything you need will end up in the

obj/ directory.

If you are not on an x86 system or you don't have nasm, you

may have to change the DEFINES in src/libFLAC/Makefile.lite. If

you don't have nasm, remove -DFLAC__HAS_NASM. If your target is

not an x86, change -DFLAC__CPU_IA32 to -DFLAC__CPU_UNKNOWN.

===============================================================================

Building with MSVC

===============================================================================

There are .vcproj projects and a master FLAC.sln solution to build all

the libraries and executables with MSVC 2005 or newer.

Prerequisite: you must have the Ogg libraries installed as described

later.

Prerequisite: you must have nasm installed, and nasm.exe must be in

your PATH, or the path to nasm.exe must be added to the list of

directories for executable files in the MSVC global options.

VC++ 2005:

To build everything, run Visual Studio, do File|Open and open FLAC.sln.

From the dropdown in the toolbar, select "Release" instead of "Debug",

then hit F7 to build.

This will build all libraries both statically (e.g.

objs\release\lib\libFLAC_static.lib) and as DLLs (e.g.

objs\release\lib\libFLAC.dll), and it will build all binaries, statically

linked (e.g. objs\release\bin\flac.exe).

Everything will end up in the "objs" directory. DLLs and .exe files

are all that are needed and can be copied to an installation area and

added to the PATH.

By default the code is configured with Ogg support. Before building FLAC

you will need to get the Ogg source distribution

(see http://xiph.org/downloads/), build libogg_static.lib (load

win32\libogg_static.sln, change solution configuration to "Release" and

code generation to "Multi-threaded (/MT)", then build), copy libogg_static.lib

into FLAC's 'objs\release\lib' directory, and copy the entire include\ogg tree

into FLAC's 'include' directory (so that there is an 'ogg' directory in FLAC's

'include' directory with the files ogg.h, os_types.h and config_types.h).

If you want to build without Ogg support, instead edit all .vcproj files

and remove any "FLAC__HAS_OGG" definitions.

===============================================================================

Building on Mac OS X

===============================================================================

If you have Fink or a recent version of OS X with the proper autotools,

the GNU flow above should work.