Hi all, this is the fre:ac development status update for September 2018.

New alpha release

I published a new alpha last month, integrating the SuperFast encoding mode and freaccmd's dynamic arguments support that I wrote about in last month's issue. With these features added, the new alpha is now almost feature complete with respect to what is planned for fre:ac 1.1 beta.

Improved tags interoperability

Several changes have been implemented to improve compatibility with tags written by other applications (most notably foobar2000). These changes enable fre:ac to extract more information from files containing such tags than previously possible. The individual improvements are:

• Support reading and writing ID3v2 tags from/to .wav files
• Support reading cue sheets from ID3v2 tags
• Use album artist for artist field if only the former is set

One example where these will be useful is when ripping a CD to a single .wav file with foobar2000. Upcoming fre:ac releases will be able to list the individual tracks contained in the .wav file even if no separate .cue file is available.

Improved error handling

Despite fre:ac 1.1 alpha releases having supported parallel conversions for some time, error handling is still designed for single threaded operation. When a conversion fails, the affected thread shows an error message and the whole conversion process stops at that point.

This will be much improved in the next release. An error in one conversion will not stop the whole process any longer. Instead, error messages will be collected and displayed all in one dialog at the end of the conversion process.

In other words, when the 100th file in a 1000 files conversion job causes an error, fre:ac will continue to process the other 900 files instead of stopping the whole job. No more worrying that large unattended conversion jobs stop early without you noticing.

HiDPI improvements

Last but not least, I've also implemented some improvements for the placement of tool windows and dialogs in HiDPI mode. Dropdown lists, popup menus, tooltips and dialogs should now be displayed where you would expect them when running in scaled mode.

This concludes this month's issue. Be sure to come back in a month for the next report.