Fre:ac

fre:ac (formerly BonkEnc) is a CD audio extractor and audio converter for Microsoft Windows. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, fre:ac is free software. 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. The program supports most important audio formats such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MP4/AAC, WMA and FLAC.
For CD audio extraction fre:ac makes use of the CDRip library developed in the CDex 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. The application supports CD information queries to the freedb online CD database and can write information tags (e.g. ID3v2) 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 (pronounced freak ).

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