Hi and welcome to the latest fre:ac development status update! I did not write a report for November as I was busy preparing the latest alpha release around the end of the month, so this report covers both, November and December of 2018.

BeGeistert 2018

On the 3rd and 4th of November I attended the BeGeistert 2018 Haiku developers conference which was held in my hometown of Hamburg, Germany. I met great people from the Haiku project, got to work on the fre:ac port for Haiku and ported Monkey's Audio over.

It was a great event and a nice experience and I'm already looking forward to attending future BeGeistert meetings in the years to come.

Flatpak (and work on Snap)

The big news for December certainly is fre:ac finally being available as a Flatpak. This makes it easier than ever for Linux users to discover and try out fre:ac.

The fre:ac Flatpak is available from Flathub, the largest application repository for Flatpak distribution.

Now that the Flatpak is ready, I'm shifting my attention towards building a Snap package as well. There already is some progress, but I did not get to work on the project a lot during the holiday season. Thus I now expect the Snap to be ready around mid January.

Enhancements

The December release of fre:ac added a notification component that can play a customizable sound or display a message box upon finished conversions. This was requested by several users doing very large conversions that might take anywhere from several minutes to hours. They often leave fre:ac running unattended, so an audible notification upon job completion can be useful.

Additionally, the December release now supports accent colors on macOS Mojave and improves scaling on HiDPI displays, especially with radio buttons and with edit fields where text was sometimes cut off in scaled mode.

Minor enhancements added in November and December include an option to switch stereo channels that was added to the channel converter DSP component and support for drag & drop in the tag editor. The latter did not make it into the December release though and will debut in the next alpha or beta.

Various fixes

In addition to the above changes, many bugs have been fixed in the past two months:

• Fixed MP4 files not being created when <directory> placeholder is used in output filename pattern
• Fixed tag editor being unable to open some file types on case-sensitive file systems
• Fixed freaccmd issues when input and output files are the same
• Fixed crash when converting mono to stereo
• Fixed encoding mono MP3s

That's all for this issue. The report for January should be out in early February, so make sure to check the site for updates.