Hi all, this is the fre:ac development status update covering April and May 2019.

A lot of interesting things have been worked on in the past two months including a new alpha release, continuous builds for Linux and several improvements and fixes.

New alpha release

The 20190423 alpha release now allows ripping with more CD drives than your system has CPU cores available. This was requested by a user who planned to connect 10 drives to his quad core system for ripping his music collection of several thousand CDs. As the CD drive's reading speed is usually the limiting factor when ripping with the CPU not fully utilized, most modern systems can easily handle multiple ripping threads per CPU core. Previous versions were limited to one thread per core, so the new release allows for great speed ups of such large scale conversion jobs.

Other than that, the new release ships mostly bug fixes. Everything already mentioned in the last report plus some last minute changes:

• Added support for cue sheets referencing multiple multi-track files
• Fixed decoding of very short Ogg files (Vorbis, Opus and Speex)
• Fixed more thread synchronization issues to improve stability

Continuous AppImage builds

The Travis CI system now builds AppImage packages for the four major architectures (i686, x86-64, ARM and ARM64) for every commit to the code repository.

This means that if you are on Linux, you can now try out the latest changes almost immediately. You can find the continuous builds on the downloads page and on GitHub.

iTunes store app support

For users of Windows 10, iTunes is now offered as an app download from the Microsoft store. Unfortunately, this means that the current integration method for the Core Audio encoder with fre:ac no longer works. You currently need to explicitly select and install the non store version of iTunes in order to continue using this high quality AAC codec in fre:ac.

This will be fixed by using an adapted integration method starting with the next fre:ac release. The new version will detect an installed iTunes app and load the Core Audio codec that comes with it.

Other fixes and updates

Several minor updates and fixes have been implemented in the past few weeks and will be included in the next release:

• Improved support for album artist in cue sheets
• Using album artist for single output file name
• Fixed issue with playlist/cue sheet placement when "Use input file folder" option is used
• Fixed invalid file time for CD rips when using "Keep time stamps" option
• Fixed ID3v2 implementation being not completely standards compliant

That's it for this issue. Be sure to stay tuned for the next one which will have some exciting news!