asymptotically the best lossless audio compression ratios
optimal support for all integer PCM wave formats up to 32 bits
fully featured Windows Media Player, foobar2000, Winamp2/3/5, dBpowerAMP, XMPlay, QCD, and XMMS input plug-ins for playback
fast operation, default mode encodes CD quality audio data at 12.4x real-time and decodes at 17.4x real-time on AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Win32, Linux, and Mac command line versions
simple to use, but powerful Windows GUI front-end,
Kermit (made by Speek)
extensible, streamable compressed format, tagging compatible
optimize option, further improving compression at no decoding cost
backward compatible with version 4.2x (decode only)
64 bits large file support under Win32
complete pipe support for encoding and decoding
complete raw file support
quick verify compressed file integrity function
compatible with Exact Audio Copy, with ID3v1.1 tagging
extensible command line format
multiple file processing on the same command line, with wildcards
option to store MD5 of raw PCM input data and function to check it
option to delete source file after successful operation
option to copy source file time stamp to destination file
bitstream error resilience and transparent real-time recovery
fast seek with intelligent caching for plug-ins
ID3v1.1 and APEv2 read tagging support for plug-ins, ID3v2 compatible
streaming support (playing HTTP streams) for foobar2000 plug-in
Replay Gain compatible plug-ins for foobar2000 and Winamp3
complete support for creating self-extracting (sfx) archives
fully featured SDK for using compressed files in any application