Hi all, a bit late, but here's the fre:ac development status update for December 2019.

fre:ac 1.1 Beta 1

The biggest news of course is the release of fre:ac 1.1 Beta 1. This concludes several years of Alpha development and paves the way for a fre:ac 1.1 final release in spring.

Some notable improvements have made it into this first beta last minute:

• The Windows and macOS versions of fre:ac now support smooth scrolling with trackpads and free-spinning mouse wheels
• Case conversion functions have been improved to better handle brackets and apostrophes
• The duration and speed of file conversions are now written to the log files
• Interoperability issues with the Windows clipboard, causing inability to paste text in some cases, have been fixed
• When installed using the Windows installer package, fre:ac can now be uninstalled via an entry in the Add/Remove Programs list

After this release in mid December, development during the rest of the month was mostly fixing bugs reported by users of the beta version.

SuperFast LAME fixes

One user provided a file showing an audible glitch when converted to MP3 with LAME while SuperFast mode is enabled. This issue traced back to a bug in the smooth class library's IO subsystem, that was missing instructions for switching between read and write mode, causing writes to fail in some cases.

Additionally, during the analysis of this issue, some rarely triggered bugs with the MP3 bitstream repacker used with LAME in SuperFast mode have been identified. Fixing these makes the repacker more robust when encountering unusual situations in the bitstream.

These fixes will be included in a second beta release in the beginning of January.

Accent color support on Windows 10

The next beta release will also respect the accent color set in Windows 10's appearance properties and use it in places like the titlebar, highlighted list entries and as the background color for selected text.

Somewhat related, work is also gouing forward on adding support for dark mode on Windows 10. That, however, will be available in a third beta release in February, at the earliest.

Other fixes

Some other fixes will be available in the upcoming second beta:

• Fixed hangs and other odd behavior when removing a disc while ripping or adding its tracks to the joblist
• Fixed Vorbis ABR bitrate management options (the values for minimum and maximum bitrate were mixed up, causing a too low bitrate to be used in many cases)

That's it for this month's issue. Make sure to come back for the fre:ac 1.1 Beta 2 release in a few days and for a new development report in one month.