Available today are multi-threaded Opus, FAAC and Core Audio codec drivers for fre:ac 1.1 Alpha. These components, dubbed SuperFast codecs, use multiple codec instances in parallel to provide faster processing on systems with multiple CPU cores.

The new technology enables significant speed-ups for conversions to single output files and in situations where the number of available CPU threads is higher than the number of tracks to convert. It works with unmodified codecs and will later be rolled-out to other codecs like LAME, FDK-AAC and Speex.

A preview release of fre:ac with SuperFast Opus, FAAC and Core Audio codec drivers is available at GitHub. The multi-threaded components will replace the regular ones in a future fre:ac 1.1 alpha or beta release.

To learn more about the technical details behind multi-threaded codec drivers, head over to the blog post on Multithreaded Opus and AAC encoding.