I made a lot of progress with fre:ac in the past three weeks as several things turned out to be simpler to fix or implement than expected. Here’s an update on the development status.

I had another look at CD ripping on OS X and implemented runtime disc detection, i.e. fre:ac will dynamically show or hide the “Add audio CD tracks” button as you insert or remove discs. In addition, autoloading tracks to the joblist and 0-click-ripping work on OS X and Linux now.

The Core Audio encoder now works perfectly on Windows and OS X, performace improvements have been implemented for the Opus and Speex encoders and drag & drop is functional on Linux now. I also managed to significantly improve stability on OS X and Linux and fix several bugs and glitches on all systems. Stability of the Linux version should now be on par with the Windows snapshots while the OS X version is still lacking a little bit in that regard. I hope to bring stbility on OS X up to par with one of the following snapshots.

Unfortunately, ID3v2 chapters are not supported yet and I decided to delay them until after the February snapshot. I think it’s a good time to release a snapshot now and give you early access to the already implemented things instead of further delaying it to get additional features in.

I need a few more days for consolidating everything, i.e. looking for and fixing remaining bugs and wrapping the packages. The next snapshot should be available within one week from now.

In parallel, I’m also working on a new website for the fre:ac project. Besides a new look and responsive design, it will feature a comment function for news and blog articles. I expect to be able to launch the new site in April, but please don’t pin me down to that date.