I released a new preview snapshot of BonkEnc 1.1 just a few minutes ago. This time the focus was on fixing bugs and stability issues. You will also notice that GUI responsiveness has improved greatly vs. the last snapshot.

The list of new features is quite short for this release. It basically introduces an album editing mode for the tag editor and adds ALAC decoding support.

The album editing mode makes it possible to edit tag fields simultaneously for all tracks of an album in the joblist. No need to set comments, cover art or other fields separately for each track anymore!

I recently spent some time fixing right-to-left script support in BonkEnc. It was a tough job, but fun to do and it’s great to see everything working in the end.

Support for right-to-left script was really broken until now. Though text display worked most of the time, typing text in edit fields did not work correctly at all in right-to-left mode. All in all, right-to-left-mode was not ready for any serious use.

Then some weeks ago, a user sent me a Hebrew translation for BonkEnc and that finally gave me the motivation to fix this. I implemented right-to-left script support for edit fields and fixed a number of glitches in text display. I finally got everything working yesterday. Now I just need to fix some performance issues before the next release.

Here's a screenshot showing BonkEnc in Hebrew language in right-to-left mode:

In a few weeks, BonkEnc 1.0.14 will be released with Hebrew language support. In the meantime, here is a preview release with right-to-left script support: bonkenc-1.0.14-pre2-bin.zip

If you would like to translate BonkEnc to other languages written from right to left, like Arabic, Farsi or others, you are welcome to download the preview release and send me your translations. I may also need someone to complete the Hebrew translation.

I added buttons for downloading the BonkEnc installer package via Download.com a few weeks ago. I hope that this step will increase public exposure of BonkEnc on the number one download site.

It takes a few days until new releases are published on Download.com, so they will be offered solely via SourceForge for approximately the first two weeks after a release.

All this only applies to the graphical installer package by the way. The ZIP and source code packages will continue to be offered for download via SourceForge only.

I released a new snapshot of the 1.1 development series a few weeks ago. It previews tons of new features that will be in BonkEnc v1.1.

Most visible to you will be the new tag editor. It is still very limited, but already allows to edit cover art and a lot of tagging fields that could not be accessed in previous versions. The tag editor will be improved in future snapshots to include an album mode and allow tag editing of files not loaded into the joblist.

The snapshot is the first to include native x86-64 support. Currently, only the FAAC, LAME and Ogg Vorbis codecs are supported on 64 bit systems, but others can be integrated as external codecs.

Speaking of codecs, support for the Speex format has been added, the external TAK encoder is included in the distribution and decoding of several basic audio formats (such as Microsoft Wave or Apple AIFF) is now done using a new libsndfile based decoder component.

The new snapshot also adds features mainly needed by professional users. The most notable is support for reading ISRC codes from CDs which is needed by radio stations ripping audio CDs for broadcast.

In addition, it greatly improves cover art and freedb support and fixes some ID3v2 tagging problems.

I released another BonkEnc CVS snapshot yesterday. During the last few weeks the focus was on adding/improving external (command line) encoder and decoder support. This brought support for the following new codecs to BonkEnc:

Encoders

• Nero Digital HE-AAC Encoder
• Fraunhofer IIS MP3 Surround Encoder
• Helix DNA Producer RealAudio Encoder
• LAME MP3 Command Line Encoder
• Flake FLAC Encoder
• Tom's Audiokompressor (TAK)
• WavPack Encoder (WV)
• Musepack Encoder (MPC)
• OptimFROG Encoder (OFR)
• Shorten Audio Encoder (SHN)
• True Audio (TTA)
• Lossless Audio (La)
• RK Audio Compressor (RKAU)

Decoders

• Tom's Audiokompressor (TAK)
• WavPack Decoder (WV)
• Musepack Decoder (MPC)
• OptimFROG Decoder (OFR)
• Shorten Audio Decoder (SHN)
• True Audio (TTA)
• Lossless Audio (La)
• RK Audio Compressor (RKAU)

Several other codecs are currently being tested and might be added in a later release. A "How to" on how to add the individual encoders and decoders to BonkEnc is included in the English language manual.

Most of the encoders allow some options to be configured using the regular BonkEnc configuration dialog. Many of them also support tagging with either ID3v2 or APEv2 tags.

I know many BonkEnc users were waiting for some of these codecs to be supported for a long time. I encourage you to try out the new snapshot and the new formats. Please be aware, however, that this is a development snapshot release and is quite bleeding edge. Some of the features of BonkEnc v1.0.x might not work correctly or might not work at all even though they are enabled in the config dialog.

I released the first development snapshot of the BonkEnc v1.1 CVS tree today. It provides a first glimpse of some of what will eventually be in BonkEnc v1.1. Here are some highlights.

The BonkEnc Component Architecture now supports encoder/decoder DLLs and provides access to external command line encoders. That way you can now use encoders like Nero's HE-AAC or Musepack with BonkEnc. The snapshot package includes Musepack and WavPack encoders and comes with ready configuration files for TAK, Shorten and Nero AAC. Just copy the respective encoder executables (takc.exe, shortn32.exe or neroAacEnc.exe) to the codecs/cmdline subdirectory and BonkEnc will recognize the encoders at next start. Support for command line encoders is still very basic, however. For example, you cannot set encoder options using the BonkEnc GUI, yet. Expect better integration with BonkEnc in one of the next snapshots.

Thanks to the new flexibility gained through the BoCA interface, components for encoding and decoding Monkey's Audio (*.ape, *.mac) files could be added. Monkey's Audio is fully supported by BonkEnc now.

The LAME MP3 decoder has been replaced by a MAD decoder component. MAD is the MPEG Audio Decoder and should provide better decoding quality than LAME (however, MAD's 24 bit decoding is not yet supported in BonkEnc). It also successfully decodes some problem files which used to make LAME and BonkEnc crash in previous releases.

Finally, the configuration dialog got a new layout. You will now find a listbox with entries for each configurable component at the left side of the window while the configuration options for the selected component will appear at the right. This has become necessary due to the switch to BoCA. Lots of configurable components just couldn't be integrated into the tabbed configuration dialog of previous releases.

I hope you will have fun playing around with the new features. Please note, however, that this is a highly experimential alpha release. It's still recommended to use BonkEnc v1.0.x for daily encoding work.