A last minute status update again this month - here's what happened in fre:ac development in May.

The designated main feature of the upcoming snapshot, chapter support for ID3v2 tags, has been implemented and tested and it's working fine already. ID3v2 chapters allow storing much more information than just chapter titles. You can add any information supported by ID3v2 on a per chapter basis. Artists and original albums for compilations, chapter comments and even cover art.

By the way, while at it, I also implemented WMA chapter support to enable chapters in all formats that are able to store them.

I'm now working on implementing cdparanoia III 10.2 cache modelling support in GNU libcdio, the CD ripping library used by fre:ac on Linux and OS X. This will allow detection of drives with faulty cache management (which might result in bad rips) and issue a warning in that case. The new snapshot will also make use of this feature when using the original cdparanoia libary.

The OS X snapshots will be digitally signed starting with the next one. That way they can be used on Mountain Lion and Mavericks without having to change the Gatekeeper settings.

If everything goes as planned during the next week, the snapshot will be released on June 8th. When it's out, I will concentrate on a service release for the 1.0.x series. fre:ac 1.0.22 should be ready around mid June.

I wrote about building a new website for the fre:ac project a few months ago and some of you might wonder what's the status of it. Well, I decided it's more important to get the software ready for a 1.1 beta release first, so the website overhaul will be delayed a few months.