Just in time for the end of the month, here's the development status update for April.

I implemented some of the things announced in the previous status update during the past few weeks. Namely, international text input is now supported on X11 based systems and CD spin-up is supported on all platforms.

International text input was tested on Linux using the Anthy Japanese IME (Input Method Editor) with the IBus and SCIM backends. It should work with other IMEs and on other operating systems as well as long as IBus or SCIM are used as backends.

CD spin-up support allows you to specify a number of seconds to wait for your drive to spin up before ripping. If configured, fre:ac will wait the set time before starting to rip a disc.

While working on those features, I found some issues with font management and high DPI scaling which will be fixed in the next snapshot. The changes will fix the blurry interface that users with high DPI displays may experience on Windows 8 and will make GUI text more readable by using the correct default font. Besides those, I also found and fixed some other graphical glitches on Windows. Tooltip shadows staying on the screen after the tooltip closed and button highlight frames appearing randomly will soon be a thing of the past.

I am now working on implementing chapter support in the id3lib version used by fre:ac. Because chapter frames can include any other ID3 frames as additional information, this requires some code restructuring in id3lib to avoid duplications. I am making good progress on this and expect to be able to test chapter support during the next week.

Unfortunately, common menu bar support on OS X will not make it into the upcoming snapshot and be delayed until the following one.

The next snapshot should be ready for release around late May / early June.