Hi all, here is the July 2018 update on fre:ac development.

New alphas and SuperFast preview

There were two new alpha releases last month providing all the new features talked about in previous development status reports and fixing several issues. Unlike previous alphas, the current version is now recommended for everyone to try out. If you find any issues, please report them to support@freac.org.

There also is a new preview of the SuperFast conversion technology, this time including SuperFast LAME. If you missed the article on how SuperFast LAME is made possible, check it out here: SuperFast LAME technical details

The SuperFast technology will be included in the next regular alpha release and will then be available for everyone to use.

Dynamic encoder arguments for freaccmd

An important item on the feature list for fre:ac 1.1 beta is support for command line configuration arguments for all codecs added during fre:ac 1.1 development. Currently, freaccmd supports arguments for a very limited set of codecs only. The code to change that lives in the dynamic-arguments branches of fre:ac and BoCA and I made good progress towards merging it with the master branches in the past month.

With the new code, codecs can specify which command line arguments they support and freaccmd will make them available without the need for any codec specific code in the command line frontend itself.

Other changes

• Improved handling of album artist in tag editor
  Handling of album artists in the tag editor has been improved to fix issues when the field is changed in album editing mode. Prior to this change this could result in the album artist information getting lost for some or all of the relevant tracks.

• Improved adjustment of dialogs to text sizes
  Several dialogs have been reworked to adjust dynamically to the size of translated texts. The width of labels displayed in a dialog can vary greatly in different languages, so dynamic adjustment is necessary. This is not completed yet, so work on this will continue in the next few months.

That's all for this issue. Make sure to come back next month for the August status update.