fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper with support for various popular formats and encoders. It currently converts between MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV and Bonk formats.

With fre:ac you easily rip your audio CDs to MP3 or WMA files for use with your hardware player or convert files that do not play with other audio software. You can even convert whole music libraries retaining the folder and filename structure.

The integrated CD ripper supports the CDDB/freedb online CD database. It will automatically query song information and write it to ID3v2 or other title information tags.

Features (click an entry to see details)

• Converter for MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV and Bonk formats
  
  fre:ac converts freely between all supported formats. No matter if you need WMA to MP3, MP3 to WAV, M4A to MP3, WAV to MP3 or any other conversion, fre:ac supports any combination of formats.
  
  
• Integrated CD ripper with CDDB/freedb title database support
  
  The integrated CD ripper will convert your audio CDs to files on your hard disk. It supports all of the formats available for regular audio file conversion. fre:ac can query the CDDB/freedb online CD database to find artist and title information prior to ripping. No need to enter track names manually.
  
  
• Portable application, install on a USB stick and take it with you
  
  fre:ac can be installed on a USB stick or external drive so you can take it with you and use it on any computer. It will also store its configuration files on the portable drive. That way it will always start up with your custom settings.
  
  
• Multi-core optimized encoders to speed up conversions on modern PCs
  
  The MP3, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and Bonk encoders integrated with fre:ac make use of modern multi-core CPUs, so ripping and converting speeds get a real boost. You will save time and get the job done quickly.
  
  
• Full Unicode support for tags and file names
  
  fre:ac provides full support for the Unicode character set. That way it can handle not only Latin scripts, but also Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic or Indian. If you like music from all over the world, you can tag your files correctly.
  
  
• Easy to learn and use, still offers expert options when you need them
  
  fre:ac's user interface is designed to be intuitive so you will be able to use the basic features without any trouble. It still offers advanced options when you need them so you will be able to go beyond simple ripping and format conversion using fre:ac.
  
  
• Multilingual user interface available in 37 languages
  
  fre:ac comes with a multilingual user interface and is currently available in 37 languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Spanish (Latin American), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Romanian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Hebrew, Arabic, Esperanto, Galician, Catalan and Valencian). It can be translated to other languages easily using the 'smooth Translator' utility that is included in the distribution.
  
  
• Completely free and open source without a catch
  
  fre:ac is available for free without any adware or other foul things. However, the project relies on your support to be able to push the development further. If you like this software, please consider making a donation. Click on one of the icons in the donation section to the right to support the fre:ac project with a donation.
  
  

A new fre:ac snapshot has been released and is now available for download. In snapshot 20130430 the playlist subsystem has been modularized and support for XSPF and PLS playlists added. It also features a new confirmation dialog for files to be overwritten in a conversion job. The new dialog is shown before the actual conversion starts and so eliminates blocking popups during mass conversion jobs.

The Linux packages should now work on most distributions and have been briefly tested on latest versions of Fedora, Mageia, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE. Last but not least, fre:ac and BoCA components can now be installed in a Unix filesystem hierarchy. This greatly simplifies the build process and will allow to provide easily installable packages in the future.

Lots of bugs have been fixed since the previous snapshot and the new version should be quite stable already. However, please still remember that it is an alpha snapshot and probably not generally suitable for daily work!

The new snapshot is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac snapshot 20120930 is now available for download. This snapshot includes bug fixes for all the known bugs in the 20120916 release and brings just some minor new features. Among the bugs fixed in this release are a deadlocking problem affecting all platforms, the previously broken 64 bit Windows package and several Mac OS X specific bugs.

Notable changes in this release are the use of mpg123 replacing MAD as the default MP3 decoder on Windows and Mac OS X and the availability of a 64 bit Linux package.

Please remember that this is still an alpha snapshot and not generally suitable for daily work!

You can get the new snapshot in the downloads section.

fre:ac snapshot 20120916 is now available for download. Along with the usual stability improvements and bug fixes it adds support for large fonts and a codec for the all new Opus audio format.

Other new features in this release are mostly targeted on improving your workflow. They include configuration options to keep processed tracks in the joblist or alternatively add encoded files to the list, an option to automatically select the first CDDB match without showing a selection popup as well as general improvements to title info editing.

While stability has generally improved with this release and specifically the OpenBSD port is running more stable now, there are also some new problems already identified. The Linux version may hang after downloading videos, the Mac OS X package is incompatible with XQuartz and thus does not work on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.x and the Solaris port crashes upon closing any windows. These issues will be taken care of in the next snapshot.

Please remember that this is still an alpha snapshot and not generally suitable for daily work!

You can get the new snapshot in the downloads section.