A new fre:ac snapshot has been released and is now available for download. In snapshot 20130430 the playlist subsystem has been modularized and support for XSPF and PLS playlists added. It also features a new confirmation dialog for files to be overwritten in a conversion job. The new dialog is shown before the actual conversion starts and so eliminates blocking popups during mass conversion jobs.

The Linux packages should now work on most distributions and have been briefly tested on latest versions of Fedora, Mageia, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE. Last but not least, fre:ac and BoCA components can now be installed in a Unix filesystem hierarchy. This greatly simplifies the build process and will allow to provide easily installable packages in the future.

Lots of bugs have been fixed since the previous snapshot and the new version should be quite stable already. However, please still remember that it is an alpha snapshot and probably not generally suitable for daily work!

The new snapshot is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac snapshot 20120930 is now available for download. This snapshot includes bug fixes for all the known bugs in the 20120916 release and brings just some minor new features. Among the bugs fixed in this release are a deadlocking problem affecting all platforms, the previously broken 64 bit Windows package and several Mac OS X specific bugs.

Notable changes in this release are the use of mpg123 replacing MAD as the default MP3 decoder on Windows and Mac OS X and the availability of a 64 bit Linux package.

Please remember that this is still an alpha snapshot and not generally suitable for daily work!

You can get the new snapshot in the downloads section.

fre:ac snapshot 20120916 is now available for download. Along with the usual stability improvements and bug fixes it adds support for large fonts and a codec for the all new Opus audio format.

Other new features in this release are mostly targeted on improving your workflow. They include configuration options to keep processed tracks in the joblist or alternatively add encoded files to the list, an option to automatically select the first CDDB match without showing a selection popup as well as general improvements to title info editing.

While stability has generally improved with this release and specifically the OpenBSD port is running more stable now, there are also some new problems already identified. The Linux version may hang after downloading videos, the Mac OS X package is incompatible with XQuartz and thus does not work on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.x and the Solaris port crashes upon closing any windows. These issues will be taken care of in the next snapshot.

Please remember that this is still an alpha snapshot and not generally suitable for daily work!

You can get the new snapshot in the downloads section.

fre:ac version 1.0.20a is now available fixing two compatibility issues in yesterday's 1.0.20 release.

The new release fixes an unintended dependency on Intel's svml_disp.dll runtime library as well as bogus error messages when running on AMD processors. The former was introduces through an incautiousness when compiling the updated LAME and Ogg codec libraries. The latter was caused by a known bug in the latest Intel compiler release and had to be worked around explicitly in fre:ac 1.0.20a.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.20a is strongly recommended to users of v1.0.20 and recommended to all users of previous versions. You can get the new release in the downloads section.

fre:ac version 1.0.20 has been released on 25th March 2012.

This release features updated LAME and Ogg codecs, translation updates and some minor bug fixes.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.20 is recommended to all users of previous versions. You can get it in the downloads section.

Update: Due to a problem with the updated codec libraries, fre:ac v1.0.20 does not work properly on most computers. Please skip it and use 1.0.20a instead.

fre:ac snapshot 20110524 adds support for multiple configurations, i.e. you can define additional configurations sets in the config dialog and switch the active configuration from the main window. That way you can have different configuration sets for archival, mobile listening and other use cases.

Other notable additions include an improved preview in the CDDB match selection dialog, support for Ogg FLAC files and support for the .oga extension on Ogg Vorbis files. A lot of effort has also been put towards improving general user interface handling and stability.

The Mac OX X version is now built as an application package that you can start by click using Finder. The snapshot also adds support for the OpenBSD and NetBSD operating systems; the OpenBSD port is still very unstable though.

The Windows and Linux versions should already be quite stable and usable, so you can use them if you need one of the new features. But please remember that this is still an alpha snapshot and not generally suitable for daily work!

You can get the new snapshot in the downloads section.