This changelog is not exhaustive, review [the git commit log](https://github.com/xiph/flac/commits) for an exhaustive list of changes.

## FLAC 1.5.0-rc1 (07-Feb-2025)

As there have been additions to the libFLAC interfaces, the libFLAC version number is incremented to 14. The libFLAC++ version number is incremented to 11.

* General
	* Multithreaded encoding is now possible in libFLAC and through the flac command line tool
	* The GFDL license file is updated to version 1.3
	* The markdown tool documentation is now also converted to HTML, for bundling with systems that do not read manpages (e.g. Windows)
	* Decoding of chained Ogg FLAC files is now possible (philippe44, Martijn van Beurden)
	* Various fixes (Sam James, Miroslav Lichvar, Cristian Rodríguez, manxorist, kgroeneveld, Lee Carré, Jevin Sweval, braheezy, Wolfgang Stöggl)
	* Is is now possible in libFLAC, libFLAC++ and metaflac to write to a new file when changing metadata, instead of needing to overwrite an existing file
* flac
	* Testing mode (flac -t) now parses all metadata blocks and warns the user when ID3v1 metadata is detected
	* A warning is displayed when frame numbers do not increase correctly throughout a file
	* The explain option (-H or --explain) is now removed, use the manpage or html tool documentation instead
	* Built-in help and tool documentation are improved (H2Swine)
	* When re-encoding a FLAC file from an existing FLAC file, a check is added that the MD5 sums of both files are the same
* libFLAC and libFLAC++
	* The library interfaces have been extended. See the porting guide (part of the API documentation)
	* An error is sent when a frame is missing
	* The algorithm of the 'loose mid side' option has changed. Instead of checking every few frames which option is best and keeping that for the next few frames, a fast heuristic is now used. This was necessary to enable multithreading
	* Most level 0 metadata interface functions now also work with Ogg FLAC files
	* When encoding Ogg FLAC files, the callback now returns a number of samples instead of always 0 (Jesper Larsson, ziplantil)
	* When changing metadata, libFLAC now detects when an input file is a symlink, and will refuse to write data to it when an in-place rewrite of the metadata cannot happen
   	* When encoding using seektable templates, unused seekpoints (with a sample number higher than the total number of samples) are converted to placeholders
* Build system
	* Fix building on Android with API version < 24 (Steve Lhomme)
	* The microbench utility has been removed
	* Enable building with emscripten (werner mendizabal)
	* Minimum CMake version required (when building with CMake) is now formally 3.12
* Testing/validation
	* Improve fuzzing of allocation failures
	* Various other fuzzing improvements
* Documentation
	* The foreign metadata storage format used by the flac command line tool is now properly documented