fre:ac snapshot 20140223 has been released and is now available for download. This new release introduces support for the Core Audio AAC encoder on Windows and OS X and enables CD ripping on OS X.

The Core Audio encoder supports AAC and ALAC formats and is available on Windows if you have iTunes or QuickTime installed. Unfortunately, it can only be used with the 32 bit version of fre:ac as Apple does not provide a 64 bit version of the Core Audio framework for Windows, yet. The new encoder can be used without any prerequisites or restrictions on OS X.

Other new features in this release are support for ripping so called hidden track one audio (HTOA) that you can find on some audio discs and gapless encoding/decoding of AAC and Opus files.

This version of fre:ac also improves stability on Linux and OS X and should run much better on these systems than previous releases. However, please remember that it is still an alpha snapshot and not meant to be used for daily work!

The new snapshot is available in the downloads section.