fre:ac version 1.0.31 has been released on 24th November 2017.

This release fixes issues detecting USB CD drives after a recent Windows update, improves audio format compatibility and updates the included codecs to the latest versions.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.31 is recommended to all users of earlier versions. You can download it at the downloads section of this site.

fre:ac v1.1 Alpha 20171119 has been released and is now available for download!

This release introduces the long awaited DSP framework which paves the way for future support of things like volume normalization or noise reduction. For now, there is a resampling DSP that can be used to change the sample rate of the converted audio.

The new version also adds support for the Monkey's Audio lossless format on macOS, Linux and FreeBSD. Previously, only decoding of Monkey's audio files was supported on these platforms through avconv/ffmpeg.

In addition, the new release updates the FAAC/FAAD2 and LAME codecs to their latest versions, fixes some instabilities and corrects various minor bugs.

Upgrading to the 20171119 release is recommended for users of previous alpha or snapshot releases. Please be aware, however, that this is a preview release and not meant for daily work. Please report issues on the SourceForge bug tracker or by email to support@freac.org.

The new release is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac version 1.0.30 has been released on 16th September 2017.

The new release updates the FAAC encoder to fix an issue with high bitrates, slightly improves the CDDB submit dialog and improves compatibility with virtual drive software.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.30 is recommended to all users of earlier versions. You can download it at the downloads section of this site.

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.