Hi all, it's time for an update on fre:ac development again. The past month was quite productive and so I have lots of things to talk about.

Integration with Travis CI

The GitHub projects for the smooth Class Library, BoCA and fre:ac are now integrated with the Travis CI platform for automated build tests. Every commit to one of these repositories now starts automatic build processes on Linux and macOS to check if anything got broken. This improves the development process by ensuring that build-breaking issues will be noticed quickly.

The build processes are also started for pull requests, so anyone who submits a patch can immediately see if it breaks anything.

Fast CRC patches accepted into FLAC and Ogg

The patches for faster CRC calculations I wrote about last month have been accepted by the upstream FLAC and Ogg projects. So with the next FLAC and Ogg releases, any software using them will benefit from faster encoding and decoding.

Allowing playback during conversions

Until now, it's not possible to play a track in fre:ac while a conversion is running. This limitation will be lifted with the next alpha release. You will be able to play tracks during conversions as long as they are not on a CD that is currently being ripped from.

Faster AAC, APE and WMA encoding

fre:ac's AAC, Monkey's Audio (APE) and WMA encoder components use temporary files for writing output data. The content of these files is transferred to the actual output file after the encoding process is finished which causes a small delay at the end of each conversion. The next alpha release will fix this by writing directly to the actual output file from the start.

Making this possible required an addition to the internal IO filter interface and extensive testing. This is why it was not done like this earlier.

Improved handling of album artists

Starting with the next alpha release, fre:ac will make use of the <albumartist> placeholder in the default output filename pattern. This prevents the creation of separate folders for each track when dealing with sampler CDs. On samplers, the previously used <artist> placeholder would resolve to a different artist for each track, while <albumartist> will usually be something like Various artists and be the same for every track.

SourceForge Project of the Month

fre:ac has been chosen as the SourceForge Project of the Month of May 2018. This is the second time fre:ac won this award after October 2015. You can read a short interview with me in the SourceForge blog.

This closes this month's issue. Be sure to come back in June for another update.