Here's the fre:ac devlopment status update for January 2016. Sorry for not giving an update in December! I was so busy with Christmas presents and other stuff that I didn't have much time to work on fre:ac that month.

Updates and fixes

I added a few new features and fixes in the past weeks. Nothing really big, but here's a list of the most important changes:

• Support for multi-channel Opus
  The 20151122 snapshot supports multi-channel audio with all formats that can handle it, except for Opus. The next shapshot will add that and complete the effort to add basic multi-channel support to fre:ac.

• Fix for reading floating point samples from .wav and .aiff files
  When reading 32 or 64 bit floating point samples from .wav or .aiff files, the signal is scaled to a range of -1.0 to 1.0 in the current implementation of the SndFile input component. For very quiet recordings, this can lead to a much louder signal after conversion, which was not intended. The next shapshot will fix this.

• Run fre:ac from a Unicode path on Windows
  Current fre:ac snapshot releases will not start when run from a path that contains Unicode characters on Windows. This is due to a non-Unicode function being used to set the PATH variable in fre:ac's launcher code and will be fixed in the next snapshot.

In addition, I'm currently investigating some issues querying the freedb database on OS X El Capitan. This slowed things down a little in the past weeks, unfortunately, and it's still not fixed. I hope to be able to find a fix in the next one or two weeks.

A DSP engine

The big new feature of the next snapshot release will be the addition of a signal processing engine. This will allow things like sample format conversions, volume normalization and effect filters. The first release with the new engine will have only a handful of DSP components, mainly for sample format conversions, but I'm quite excited about the possibilities.

By the way, the advent of the DSP engine will help close the oldest still open feature request on the SourceForge tracker. In January 2005 a request to add a normalization feature was posted there.

I will probably have more news about this in the next update.

Next snapshot and fre:ac 1.0.27

Integrating the DSP stuff is a lot of work, so I don't think the next snapshot will be out before March. There will be a new release of the stable series in the near future, though. Quite a few fixes have piled up since 1.0.26, so a new release seems justified. I plan to wait for the upcoming FLAC 1.3.2 release, though, in order to have the latest codec versions in fre:ac 1.0.27. The FLAC developers are currently discussing to make a new release on their mailing list.

That's all for this time. Thank you for reading!