fre:ac v1.1 Beta 1 has been released and is now available for download!

This release adds an extension for writing log files and introduces support for dark mode on macOS.

Other important improvements and fixes in this release are:

• Greatly improved performance when output is going to a HDD drive
• Adding files to the joblist can now use multiple threads
• Support for using the AAC encoder of the iTunes store app on Windows
• Greatly improved tagging support (new fields and compatibility fixes)
• Fixed invalid file time for CD rips when using "Keep time stamps" option
• Fixed MP4 AAC files not always being gapless
• Fixed several keyboard input issues
• Fixed several stability issues and hangs

Upgrading to the 1.1 beta 1 release is strongly recommended for users of previous alpha releases. All users of the stable release of fre:ac are encouraged to try this beta instead. Please report issues on the GitHub issue tracker or by email to support@freac.org.

The new release is available in the downloads section.

Feature development for fre:ac 1.1 has been completed and preparations for a beta release in mid December are being carried out right now.

The new release will be a major feature update over the current 1.0.x release series. Highlights among fre:ac 1.1 features include support for macOS and Linux, parallel processing, multi-channel audio and a tag editor. In total, the 1.1 release series will introduce more than 80 new features.

We are still looking for volunteers to update the translations for sevaral languages for the 1.1 release series. If you speak any of the following languages and would like to contribute a translation update, please refer to this GitHub issue or contact translations@freac.org:

Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Cantonese, Catalan, simplified Chinese, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Spanish (Latin American), Ukrainian, Valencian, Vietnamese

You can also contribute completely new translations of fre:ac. Please contact translations@freac.org in this case.

The fre:ac v1.1 Alpha 20190423a hotfix has been released to add support for macOS 10.15 Catalina.

In previous releases up to 20190423 it's not possible to select any files or folders in file open/save dialogs. It looks like this is caused by a broken open/save panel programming interface in macOS Catalina. Chances are that this will be fixed in a future macOS update. In the meantime, the 20190423a hotfix implements a work-around for this incompatibility.

The update is available in the downloads section.

The Travis CI system now creates AppImages for every commit to the fre:ac source repository. This means that you can now try the latest changes right after they land in the repository without having to build fre:ac yourself, for example to verify fixes or test new feature additions.

AppImages are distribution independent Linux packages that bundle most dependencies and should work on any modern distribution. To start an AppImage, just make it executable after download and run it:

chmod a+x freac-continuous-linux-x86_64.AppImage
./freac-continuous-linux-x86_64.AppImage

Packages are provided for the x86, x86-64, ARM and ARM64 system architectures making it the first time that fre:ac binaries for ARM/ARM64 systems are made available outside of the Snap store.

Get your AppImage at the downloads page or from GitHub.

fre:ac v1.1 Alpha 20190423 has been released and is now available for download!

This release adds support for ripping with more CD drives than there are CPU threads available. So if you have thousands of discs to archive and some spare drives, this is for you.

Other important improvements and fixes in this release are:

• Added support for PulseAudio output on Linux
• Added support for drag & drop in the tag editor
• Improved interoperability of playlist files with VLC
• Improved handling of cue sheets referencing multiple files
• Fixed crash when showing freedb multi-match dialog
• Fixed float samples processing with Core Audio encoder
• Fixed MP4 output issues when input and output files are the same
• Fixed decoding of 24 bit WMA Lossless files on Windows 10
• Fixed several issues handling Opus files
• Fixed several stability issues and hangs

Upgrading to the 20190423 release is strongly recommended for users of previous alpha releases. All users of the stable release of fre:ac are encouraged to try this alpha instead. Please report issues on the GitHub issue tracker or by email to support@freac.org.

The new release is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac is now also available packaged as an AppImage for Linux systems.

AppImages are self-contained packages that can be downloaded and run on most Linux distributions without the need to install any additional software. Just mark the downloaded AppImage as executable and run it.

Get the AppImage for your architecture at the downloads page!