Fre:ac

fre:ac

Developer(s)	Robert Kausch
Initial release	May 12, 2001; 23 years ago (2001-05-12) (as BonkEnc)
Stable release	1.1.7 / 6 March 2023; 20 months ago (2023-03-06)[1]
Repository	github.com/enzo1982/freac
Written in	C, C++
Operating system	Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD
Type	CD ripper
License	GPL-2.0-or-later
Website	www.freac.org

fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD extractor for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, distributed under the GPL-2.0-or-later.^[2]

Besides extracting audio from compact discs (with various features including hidden track detection), fre:ac can also convert audio files from one format to another or to the same format but a lower bitrate. fre:ac is compatible with many audio formats such as Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4/M4A, AAC, WAV, WMA, and more.^[3][4] fre:ac uses the CDex library to convert from CDs and uses freedb to retrieve artist/song information from the internet which is written to the files as various types of ID3 tags; this library supports cdparanoia which aims to improve audio quality.^[5] The user interface is multilingual with 43 languages and is able to be a portable install on a USB drive.