Here's the fre:ac development status update for January 2017. It's already February now, so let's not lose any more time and go right ahead.

Work on the next snapshot

Since the last update, a lot of changes for inclusion with the next snapshot have been implemented. These are the most important ones:

• Advanced info extraction from file names
  When no tag information is available for a file loaded into the joblist (as often happens with .wav files), current versions of fre:ac take the file name and treat the first part before a " - " delimiter as the artist and the last part as the title. So, for example, in Ed Sheeran - Shape of You.wav the artist and title will be correctly recognized. With more advanced naming schemes, fre:ac can easily get confused, though.

  The new algorithm knows and recognizes lots of different popular naming schemes. For example, it now takes the folder name into account to recognize patterns like <artist> - <album>\<track> - <title> and it looks for numbers in the file name and treats them as track numbers.

• Easier format selection for codecs supporting multiple formats
  Some encoder components like Core Audio or SndFile support different output formats. For example, SndFile can create .wav or .aiff files. Starting with the next snapshot, fre:ac will allow you to select the desired output format directly from the Start encoding drop down menu. It's no longer necessary to go to the configuration dialog to change the output format.

• Create one playlist / cue sheet per folder
  When converting multiple albums in one conversion run, current versions of fre:ac create a single playlist or cue sheet file with all the tracks of all albums, which is probably not what you want in most cases.

  Starting with the next snapshot, there will be an option (enabled by default) to create separate playlist and cue sheet files per output folder. So, if you use a pattern like the default <artist> - <album>\<artist> - <album> - <track> - <title>, you will get separate playlist and cue sheet files for each album.

• Faster editing of tracks with cover art
  In the current snapshot version, performance can get really slow when editing title information of tracks with cover art. This will be fixed in the next snapshot thanks to fre:ac user Shri, who reported this behaviour as a bug on SourceForge.

• Open the output folder from the main window
  Next to the name of the output folder at the bottom of the main window now is a button to open that folder in your systems file explorer.

• Polishing for an upcoming beta release
  Several minor changes have been implemented to get fre:ac 1.1 closer to a beta release. For example, the macOS version now displays conversion progress in the dock, fre:ac's application name is no longer shown as unknown in the Gnome panel on Linux or FreeBSD and fre:ac recognizes configuration files of 1.0.x releases and keeps most settings when upgrading from such a version.

Some more changes are queued for the next snapshot, but are not quite ready yet, which is why there was no new snapshot release in January. I hope to be able to talk about those changes in next month's issue.

1.0.28 coming soon

I hoped to have a new stable release by now, but things turned out a little more complicated. A compilation bug was found in FLAC 1.3.2 and I decided to wait for a fixed release. However, probably due to lots of people submitting various fixes for FLAC 1.3.2, that have to be reviewed and integrated, a new version is not available yet.

Thus, I decided to just apply the patch for the compilation bug to FLAC 1.3.2 and make a fre:ac release with it. I expect to be able to push out fre:ac 1.0.28 in the next few days.

That's it for this update. Stay tuned for the 1.0.28 release and a new status update next month.