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.
  
  

fre:ac version 1.0.20a is now available fixing two compatibility issues in yesterday's 1.0.20 release.

The new release fixes an unintended dependency on Intel's svml_disp.dll runtime library as well as bogus error messages when running on AMD processors. The former was introduces through an incautiousness when compiling the updated LAME and Ogg codec libraries. The latter was caused by a known bug in the latest Intel compiler release and had to be worked around explicitly in fre:ac 1.0.20a.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.20a is strongly recommended to users of v1.0.20 and recommended to all users of previous versions. You can get the new release in the downloads section.

fre:ac version 1.0.20 has been released on 10th May 2011.

This release features updated LAME and Ogg codecs, translation updates and some minor bug fixes.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.20 is recommended to all users of previous versions. You can get it in the downloads section.

Update: Due to a problem with the updated codec libraries, fre:ac v1.0.20 does not work properly on most computers. Please skip it and use 1.0.20a instead.

fre:ac snapshot 20110524 adds support for multiple configurations, i.e. you can define additional configurations sets in the config dialog and switch the active configuration from the main window. That way you can have different configuration sets for archival, mobile listening and other use cases.

Other notable additions include an improved preview in the CDDB match selection dialog, support for Ogg FLAC files and support for the .oga extension on Ogg Vorbis files. A lot of effort has also been put towards improving general user interface handling and stability.

The Mac OX X version is now built as an application package that you can start by click using Finder. The snapshot also adds support for the OpenBSD and NetBSD operating systems; the OpenBSD port is still very unstable though.

The Windows and Linux versions should already be quite stable and usable, so you can use them if you need one of the new features. But 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.