It's been a while since my last update here. In the meantime BonkEnc v1.0 Beta 4 has been released and it has been a great success! The software has been downloaded about 30,000 times since it was released one month ago. Even better, unlike previous releases, Beta 4 seems to contain only very few bugs. This should give me more time to concentrate on finishing the final v1.0.

Bugs that have been reported so far:

• failure to read HE-AAC files correctly

this was related to how BonkEnc calculated MP4 track duration and is already fixed in CVS

• crash when encoding from FLAC to AAC

this only occurred with this decoder/encoder combination; it's also fixed in CVS

• some new freedb problems that didn't occur in previous releases

the rewrite of the freedb component introduced some new bugs, but they are not critical and should be easy to fix

Before v1.0 will be released there will be another snapshot probably in August or September.

Sorry to the developers that I didn't finish the Bonk library yet. In fact I just made an implementation good enough for use in BonkEnc, but didn't implement features like seeking or multichannel support yet. These will follow soon and the library will be released then.

I will have some free days now before the next semester starts at university. I will try to dedicate some time to the development of BonkEnc.

Some time has passed since the last BonkEnc release, but the next release will be available soon.

I'm currently working on a stand-alone Bonk audio library which will allow 3rd party developers to integrate Bonk support into their products. It will also help us ease the development of Bonk plug-ins for 3rd party audio applications. The currently available Bonk plug-ins for Winamp were each using their own Bonk codec. In the future all plug-ins will be based on the unified Bonk library.

I expect to be ready to release BonkEnc v1.0 beta 4 in about four weeks. The Bonk library might be released one or two weeks earlier.

After looking for a good content management system for the BonkEnc site for a while, I stumbled upon Joomla. I played around with it a little and then decided to use it for the BonkEnc website.

It's my first try on a CMS and I'm really enthusiastic about all the features now. It's just great to manage the site with Joomla. The consequence will hopefully be more frequent site updates.

I will try to write something to this blog reqularly to inform you about where BonkEnc development is going. So check back here more often in the future!