One day behind schedule, the latest fre:ac snapshot is now available for download.

Adding support for chapters in ID3v2, Vorbis Comment and Windows Media tags, this release greatly improves chapter support in fre:ac. Chapters are now available with all output formats that support them, including MP3, MP4/AAC, Opus, Vorbis, FLAC and WMA.

Other new features include support for spinning up CDs before ripping, up to date cdparanoia support on all systems as well as the ability to read ISRCs on non-Windows systems.

The new snapshot is also the first one to include all standard codecs with the Linux and FreeBSD packages. You will no longer have to install these codecs manually to make them available in fre:ac. The Linux packages also add support for international text input using an IME and restore support for some older distributions that the 20140223 release failed to start on. The FreeBSD version is now compiled for FreeBSD 10.0 and available in 32 and 64 bit flavors.

Users running recent versions of Windows on a high DPI display will notice a much clearer interface with better readable text compared to previous snapshots and fre:ac 1.0.21a. This improvement will also be included in fre:ac 1.0.22 which is to be released in a few weeks.

The OS X package is now digitally signed and runs on Mountain Lion and Mavericks without having to change the default Gatekeeper settings. It also improves memory management, so fre:ac will no longer use up all your system memory on larger jobs on OS X.

Besides those improvements, the new snapshot also fixes various bugs, glitches and stability issues. Please remember that it is still an alpha snapshot, though, and not meant to be used for daily work!

The new snapshot is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac snapshot 20140223 has been released and is now available for download. This new release introduces support for the Core Audio AAC encoder on Windows and OS X and enables CD ripping on OS X.

The Core Audio encoder supports AAC and ALAC formats and is available on Windows if you have iTunes or QuickTime installed. Unfortunately, it can only be used with the 32 bit version of fre:ac as Apple does not provide a 64 bit version of the Core Audio framework for Windows, yet. The new encoder can be used without any prerequisites or restrictions on OS X.

Other new features in this release are support for ripping so called hidden track one audio (HTOA) that you can find on some audio discs and gapless encoding/decoding of AAC and Opus files.

This version of fre:ac also improves stability on Linux and OS X and should run much better on these systems than previous releases. However, please remember that it is still an alpha snapshot and not meant to be used for daily work!

The new snapshot is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac snapshot 20131217 has been released and is now available for download. This snapshot focuses on improving the OS X version of fre:ac and on stability and reliability in general.

Speaking about OS X, the new snapshot now runs natively on Cocoa eliminating the need to start XQuartz with fre:ac. It also adds support for OS X Leopard (including G4 and G5 based systems) and Mavericks. Please note that for fre:ac to work properly on Mavericks you need to have the 10.9.1 update installed.

Other improvements include a slider to seek forward and backward while playing a track, support for Windows Media playlists as well as support for the Opus 1.1 and FLAC 1.3.0 codecs.

Please note that with this release binary packages for NetBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris are discontinued due to low download numbers. You can still build your own binaries on those operating systems.

A huge number of bugs have been fixed since the previous snapshot and the new version should be really stable now. However, please remember that it is still an alpha snapshot and not meant to be used for daily work!

The new snapshot is available in the downloads section.

fre:ac version 1.0.21a has been released on 19th July 2013.

This release fixes several bugs that have been found in fre:ac v1.0.21, the most important being one to make the WMA encoder work again.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.21a is strongly recommended to all users of fre:ac v1.0.21 and recommended to users of previous versions. You can download it at the downloads section of this site.

fre:ac version 1.0.21 has been released on 14th July 2013.

The beta release published a few weeks ago proved to be very stable and so there are only minor changes in the final v1.0.21. The new release provides translation updates for Romanian and Swedish languages and fixes the default settings for the FLAC encoder to match those of the command line FLAC utility.

Of course it also incorporates the changes introduced with fre:ac v1.0.21 beta 1 which include support for large fonts as well as general performance and stability improvements.

Upgrading to fre:ac v1.0.21 is recommended to all users of previous versions. You can download it at the downloads section of this site.

A new fre:ac beta release is now available for download. Version 1.0.21 beta 1 features an updated runtime library that lets it benefit from several improvements previously limited to fre:ac development snapshots.

Notable improvements are support for large fonts in the user interface, context menus for text edit fields as well as general performance and stability improvements.

The new release also introduces Bulgarian language support, updates the FLAC codec to version 1.3.0 and fixes some minor bugs.

Please be aware that this is still a beta release which might contain undiscovered bugs. You can get the new beta release in the downloads section.