fre:ac

fre:ac, formerly known as BonkEnc, is an audio converter and CD ripper for Windows, macOS and Linux, released under the GNU General Public License v2. It has two jobs that overlap more than people expect: turning the tracks on a compact disc into files, and converting audio you already have into whatever format a player, phone or car stereo actually accepts. Both jobs end with correctly named files that carry proper tags, which is where a lot of quick converters quietly fail.

Formats, encoders and quality settings

On the output side fre:ac covers the formats most collections need: MP3 through LAME, AAC through the Fraunhofer encoder, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, Musepack, Speex, WMA and uncompressed WAV or AIFF. Bitrate, quality and encoder-specific options are exposed per format, and encoding is multi-threaded, so a modern processor converts a queue considerably faster than a single-threaded tool would. The encoder components keep their own licences, which is worth knowing if you plan to redistribute the program, but none of that affects ordinary personal use.

Ripping a disc without losing the details

For CD ripping, fre:ac looks up disc and track information from online databases such as CDDB, freedb and GNUDB and writes the result into the tags, so albums arrive with artist, title, track numbers, year and cover where the database has a cover to offer. AccurateRip verification compares your rip against other people's results for the same pressing, which is the practical way to find out whether a scratched disc produced a clean copy. A tag editor allows corrections before or after encoding, and file names can be built from tag fields through a configurable pattern.

Practical configuration and limits

The converter keeps a joblist rather than a single-file dialog, so a large batch is a matter of dragging folders in and pressing start. Conversion can be combined with signal processing such as resampling or normalisation, and the program runs in portable mode from a USB stick if you keep the right file next to the executable. The main limits are the ones the format imposes: converting a lossy file to another lossy format loses quality again, so keeping an original archive copy in FLAC is worth the disk space, and gapless playback depends on both the encoder settings and the player being used.

Who should choose something else

Exact Audio Copy remains the obsessive's choice for ripping with detailed error reporting and CUE sheet handling. For playback and library management rather than conversion, foobar2000 or Quod Libet will do more. And when audio has to be edited, cleaned up or restored rather than converted, an editor such as Audacity or Ocenaudio is the right kind of program, because a converter deliberately changes nothing about the sound except the format.