As some of you might already know from my posts in the support forums, the next feature release - BonkEnc v1.1 - will include a component model to ease addition of new encoders and decoders to BonkEnc and to finally make DSP filters like volume normalization or declicking possible.

BoCA - the BonkEnc Component Architecture - works using a runtime library that provides C++ APIs to both the application and individual components. Internally it uses a C API to allow dynamic loading of components. Services provided by the runtime library are split into component, application and common services. Application services include a component registry and wrapper classes around the internal C API. Component services provide support for reading and writing tags (although this will be replaced by individual components in the future) and other utility functions. Finally, common services include classes for storing track format and title information.

I'm currently working hard to get the BonkEnc v1.1 code and BoCA into a usable state. Most input and output filters have already been converted into components, but the configuration dialogs are not done, yet. Once everything is ready I will release a binary CVS snapshot as a public alpha release.

With the alpha release a component SDK will be made available to allow developers to create their own encoder / decoder components. Support for DSP and other components will be added in a later release.

After more than five years of working on the BonkEnc project, version 1.0 of BonkEnc is finally available. I think it's time to tell something about myself now. Here are some facts first:

I will finish university in summer '07 and currently plan to apply for a master program in software architecture then. I'd like to spend some years working abroad after I got my M.Sc., maybe in Japan or the US.

I founded the BonkEnc project back in 2001, because I didn't like the user interface of CDex. I wanted to create an application that's easy to use for beginners and powerful enough to be useful for advanced users at the same time.

Soon the project developed a life of its own. People requested this feature and that feature and my to do list grew longer and longer. I finally made a list of features that I wanted to have in a v1.0 release.

This eventually led to the release of BonkEnc v1.0 beta 1 in mid 2003. A version that I considered almost feature complete. But as more and more people started using BonkEnc, even more features were requested. I realized that beta 1 was not even near version 1.0.

Finally BonkEnc v1.0 has been released and I think it's a great product. It has almost every feature users requested in the past five years.

Development will now concentrate on BonkEnc v1.1. It will include all the features that required too many architectural changes to be included in v1.0. Support for more encoders, multi threading and multi channel support are just a few examples. And I promise it won't take another five years until the release.

It's been a while since my last update here. In the meantime BonkEnc v1.0 Beta 4 has been released and it has been a great success! The software has been downloaded about 30,000 times since it was released one month ago. Even better, unlike previous releases, Beta 4 seems to contain only very few bugs. This should give me more time to concentrate on finishing the final v1.0.

Bugs that have been reported so far:

• failure to read HE-AAC files correctly

this was related to how BonkEnc calculated MP4 track duration and is already fixed in CVS

• crash when encoding from FLAC to AAC

this only occurred with this decoder/encoder combination; it's also fixed in CVS

• some new freedb problems that didn't occur in previous releases

the rewrite of the freedb component introduced some new bugs, but they are not critical and should be easy to fix

Before v1.0 will be released there will be another snapshot probably in August or September.

Sorry to the developers that I didn't finish the Bonk library yet. In fact I just made an implementation good enough for use in BonkEnc, but didn't implement features like seeking or multichannel support yet. These will follow soon and the library will be released then.

I will have some free days now before the next semester starts at university. I will try to dedicate some time to the development of BonkEnc.

Some time has passed since the last BonkEnc release, but the next release will be available soon.

I'm currently working on a stand-alone Bonk audio library which will allow 3rd party developers to integrate Bonk support into their products. It will also help us ease the development of Bonk plug-ins for 3rd party audio applications. The currently available Bonk plug-ins for Winamp were each using their own Bonk codec. In the future all plug-ins will be based on the unified Bonk library.

I expect to be ready to release BonkEnc v1.0 beta 4 in about four weeks. The Bonk library might be released one or two weeks earlier.

After looking for a good content management system for the BonkEnc site for a while, I stumbled upon Joomla. I played around with it a little and then decided to use it for the BonkEnc website.

It's my first try on a CMS and I'm really enthusiastic about all the features now. It's just great to manage the site with Joomla. The consequence will hopefully be more frequent site updates.

I will try to write something to this blog reqularly to inform you about where BonkEnc development is going. So check back here more often in the future!