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Here's the July 2015 update on fre:ac development.

The past month was quite productive, so I've got a lot of things to share. The best is: I'm already preparing a new snapshot which you'll get to try this weekend!

Ogg Vorbis on x64 (other than Windows)

The reason for the quick release is a little unfortunate, though. The 20150705 snapshot was the first to include an Ogg Vorbis codec with the Lancer SSE patch applied. Turned out that patch contained a bug that made it incompatible with non-Windows x64 platforms, so the x64 flavours of 20150705 on OS X, Linux and FreeBSD all produce garbled sound when encoding or decoding .ogg files. The reason is the use of long values in structures used by the SSE optimizations. While the long type on Windows is always 32 bit regardless of the system bitness, it changes size to 64 bit on most other x64 OS which in turn causes problems with code expecting every long value to always be 32 bit. As this is quite a show stopper bug for everyone using Ogg Vorbis on one of the affected platforms, I decided to make a new release as quickly as possible after I fixed this.

New features and some more fixes

Fortunately, the rest of this update is much more enjoyable. I worked hard and added a whole bunch of new features after the 20150705 release:

• Input verification for lossless audio formats
  While the previous snapshot added verification for lossless output files, the coming one will add support for checking the integrity of input files for some lossless formats. This currently works with FLAC, TAK and WavPack which include an MD5 checksum of the original audio. fre:ac will display an error message when it detects a checksum mismatch for such a file.

• Improved support for multi-channel audio files
  With previous versions of fre:ac, you often got the "fre:ac does not support more than 2 channels!" message when trying to convert multi-channel audio files (e.g. 5.1 files). The next snapshot will add (basic) support for this. You will be able to convert multi-channel files between formats supporting more than two channels. These include WAV, FLAC, Vorbis, WMA, WavPack and TAK. In addition, the new release will add scripts to enable decoding of AC3 and DTS files.

• Support for editing the configuration while converting
  Ever since the first public release, fre:ac denied changing the configuration while a conversion was running. No more! The upcoming release will allow configuration changes to be made at any time. These will not affect running conversions, so if you start a conversion of some CD tracks to FLAC, you can already set up fre:ac for the next conversion run using LAME or any other codec without interfering with the running job.

• Support for shutting down the computer after conversion on OS X and Linux/Unix
  This option previously worked on Windows only and is now available on OS X and Linux/FreeBSD as well. It can be useful if, for example, you want to go to sleep and have your computer shut down automatically after finishing that long running conversion job.

Besides those features and the Ogg Vorbis x64 fix, the snapshot will also fix some minor issues. When using parallel conversions, tracks sometimes stayed in the joblist even if they had been processed successfully. This was caused by a synchronization issue between the management thread that schedules the individual track conversions and the actual worker threads. Another issue affected decoding of very short MP3 files (just a few seconds long). fre:ac often produced empty output for such files due to a bug in the MP3 decoder initialization code. These two issues will be gone with the next snapshot.

fre:ac 1.0.24

That's it for the upcoming snapshot release, but there's more. fre:ac 1.0.24 will be released this Friday (if everything goes as planned; the SourceForge site is still only halfway operational after they had a storage system fault last week, so the fre:ac release depends on whether they get everything back up in time). This new stable release will fix some minor issues and annoyances, update the Vorbis codec to version 1.3.5 (plus aoTuV 6.03 patches) and enable the flat titlebar style on Windows 8.x and 10 (see last months update for details).

That closes this update. Make sure to grab one of the new releases this weekend and come back for the next issue in a month!

Hi folks, I'm back again! Sorry for not giving status updates in the past few months!

As I wrote in December, I originally planned to release a new snapshot around the end of January. Unfortunately, some bugs in the OS X version surfaced around that time, so I had to fix them first.

Stability issues on OS X

The problems caused fre:ac to crash on many Macs whenever you tried to add CD tracks to the joblist. This rendered CD ripping with fre:ac virtually impossible for many users.

To make things worse, for the first six to eight weeks that I knew about that issue, I was completely unable to reproduce it on any of my computers. I knew it was there, however, as it had been reported independently by several users.

I finally succeeded in reproducing the problem on a friends MacBook Pro at some point. However, fixing it took me another few weeks. It turned out that there were several separate issues leading to crashes when the freedb query dialog was displayed or closed. Most of them were related to window management in a multithreaded environment.

The issues are fixed now and will be gone in the next snapshot which should be out in the next few days - anywhere between July 1st and 5th, depending on how many bugs I find while preparing the packages.

Changes in the next snapshot

Trying to reproduce and fix the CD ripping issues, I spent a lot of time using and testing fre:ac on OS X and found several unrelated issues on that platform:

• Audio playback was stuttering or clicking due to an improper buffer size.
• Ejecting CDs did not work, because of a bug in the CDIO library.
• The user interface was reacting slowly, especially on OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

All these problems should be fixed in the upcoming snapshot. The disc eject issue also applied to the Linux version of fre:ac and will be fixed there as well.

In addition, on Windows 8.x and 10, fre:ac will get a new flat titlebar style with this snapshot. The new style goes better with the flat style of Windows 10 and also looks slightly better than the old titlebar on Windows 8.x.

New features

On the feature side, the new version will add support for verifying lossless encodes. Enabling the corresponding option will add a verification stage to the conversion process. It decodes files created in the conversion stage and compares them to what has originally been passed to the encoder.

This works with most losslessly compressed output formats supported by fre:ac - FLAC, ALAC, APE, WMA Lossless and others. In case of a data mismatch between the conversion and the verification stage, fre:ac will display an error message including both MD5 checksums for each mismatched file.

Starting with the next snapshot, fre:ac will also display a warning message when it detects a conversion from a lossy to a losslessly compressed format. Such conversions are not reasonable in most cases, but many user mistakenly think that converting to a lossless format will improve quality. Of course you will be able to ignore and even disable that warning in case you really need to do such conversions.

The parallel conversion mode is now enabled by default and no longer marked as experimental. The audio conversion engine has been completely restructured since the October snapshot and the same code is now used for serial and parallel conversions (basically, non-parallel conversions are now treated as parallel conversions with only one thread). As I mentioned in my December status update, you will also be able to rip simultaneously using multiple drives.

Of course, the new release will also update codecs to their latest versions and include the performance optimizations I mentioned in October.

That's it for this issue. I will try to go back to monthly status updates, so there should be another one in four or five weeks.

I only now noticed that Apple has added native 64 bit support to iTunes for Windows with version 12.1. Previous releases only had a 64 bit installer that actually installed the 32 bit version of iTunes. This switch is great news as it allows the 64 bit version of fre:ac to use Apple's Core Audio encoder without any hacks and eliminates one of the last reasons to stick to 32 bit fre:ac on 64 bit Windows.

If you are already using the 20141005 x64 version of fre:ac, all you need to do to make use of the encoder is install the latest version of iTunes or upgrade your existing installation to version 12.1 or later. The Core Audio encoder will then show up after restarting fre:ac, replacing the inferior FAAC encoder.

For users of the 32 bit fre:ac snapshot, nothing changes as the new iTunes release still installs the 32 bit version of the Core Audio libraries alongside the 64 bit one.

Besides validation of lossless conversions, I did not announce much of what is coming in the next development release, yet.

One major thing is that the parallel conversion mode introduced in September will no longer be marked experimental and become the default and only mode of operation in the next snapshot. It should be stable enough for general use now and missing features like support for non-on-the-fly conversion are implemented. You will also be able to rip CDs using multiple drives at the same time on Windows with the next snapshot (this already works on Linux and OS X with fre:ac 20141005).

OS X users with modern Macs will be happy to read that I am working on support for Retina displays. I ran into some minor problems there, however, so I'm not 100% sure that it will be ready for the next release.

Besides those things, I am working on fixing issues found in the previous release. One that I would like to mention is the inability to add folders that include sqare brackets [] in their name using drag & drop or the "add folder" function on OS X and Linux. This is due to an internally used system call interpreting the brackets as wildcard characters on those systems. The next release will properly escape those characters before passing them to the system call to fix this issue.

The next snapshot will be available a little later than originally planned. I now expect to be able to release it around the end of January.

Here's the fre:ac development status update for November.

I continued work on fre:ac 1.0.23 this month, fixing some bugs and adding support for reading floating point data from Windows Wave files. I planned to release last weekend, but shortly before I got notified that FLAC 1.3.1 would be released a few days later to fix some security issues. Because of that, I decided to delay the fre:ac release by one week in order to be able to include the new FLAC version. It is ready now, so fre:ac 1.0.23 will be released tomorrow.

Regarding the development version, I continued work on the validation feature. However, progress was rather slow in the past few weeks, so I do not have much more to write about.

I can give an estimate for the next snapshot release, though. It should be ready in about six weeks, so expect a new release in early to mid January.