Hi and welcome to the March 2018 status update on fre:ac development.

The past month finally saw the 1.0.32 release and a new fre:ac 1.1 alpha providing lots of fixes and new features. Apart from that, I worked mostly on two things: Making the config dialogs for external codecs more beauti- and useful and implementing the repacker part of the upcoming SuperFast LAME encoder.

Improved config dialogs for external codecs

The configuration dialogs for external codecs are generated on the fly from a description provided by the external codec's XML script. Until now, that dialog was very small and displayed only one option at a time:

The next alpha will feature an improved configuration dialog generator. It will create dialogs that show all the options at the same time and provide more space for them:

Progress on SuperFast codecs

I spent a lot of time on writing the repacker part for the SuperFast LAME encoder in the past few weeks. A proof-of-concept was done quickly, but implementing all the edge cases turned out to be more difficult than I initially thought. Particularly, correct handling of the bit-reservoir was a lot of work. Nevertheless, it's working great now and I'm now in the testing stage.

The code for the SuperFast LAME component is now available in the SuperFast GitHub repository.

A few things are still missing, like support for CBR mode, CRC checksums and generating a valid Xing header, but I am confident that I can implement these things in the next few weeks.

I'm currently preparing a new SuperFast preview release based on fre:ac 1.1 alpha 20180306 which I plan to release in the next few days. As mentioned earlier, this will not include the SuperFast LAME encoder yet, but introduce SuperFast FDK-AAC and Speex along with some tweaks for the other codecs.

That's it for the moment. Make sure to come back in a month for another update.