Open Source FFMPEG
The open source file converter is quite primal but armed with the libavformat library, it is a small yet terrible audio file converter indeed. Developed under Linux, it can be compiled to work with any operating system including Mac OS X, Windows and Amiga OS. The best feature is that it’s free, though you’d have to be a whiz with audio conversion with the command line interface. The strong point of the program is the ability to obtain and use streaming audio for conversion into most audio formats, with all of this done in real time. The program is utilized by many more familiar open-sourced projects such as Google’s Chrome, HandBrake, Mplayer, VLC and a lot more.
The command line interface would be the main detractor for most of us love tge GUi yet this can be addressed by the projects that were developed using the same program. The software is free and is released with a GNU public license but some parts of the software are patented which may require some adjustments according to the included modules. The full featured product contains more than 100 codecs (some of these are patented) which are taken out with the free features, hence the necessary license adjustments for legal reasons. In the US they are patented but in the EU where software is still to implement software patent programs, reverse engineering is done to address compatibility issues.
