v1.4.0

ARver-1.4.0 release notes

This release was supposed to contain more features, but recently I've had little time and energy to devote to this project. I'm making this release now so that the two requested features are not stuck in a pre-release limbo anymore.

New features

• It is possible to select the CD drive used by arver and arver-discinfo.

  • It appears some people still have more than one optical drive in their machines.
  • -d/--drive option can be used to select the device (e.g. /dev/sr0).

• arver can guess disc TOC from audio file lengths.

  • -t/--track-lengths option enables guessing the disc TOC from file lengths.
  • -P/--pregap-length and -D/--data-length can be used to provide the length of track one pregap and of the Enhanced CD data track, if known from another source.
  • Please see "Verification without a physical disc" section in README.md for details.

Thanks to @themaddoctor for requesting these features and helping to test them.

Bug fixes

More network errors should now be gracefully handled without crashing.

Behind the scenes

• Provide just one pre-built wheel targeting Python 3.7 and newer, instead of separate wheels for each supported Python version.
• Set up automated testing with GitHub Actions.
• Add more tests.

Full changelog is available here: v1.3.0...v1.4.0

v1.4.0.dev2

ARver-1.4.0.dev2 release notes

This is a development release intended for testing two features:

• Guessing disc TOC from audio file lengths (#1)
• Adding a command-line option for specifying which drive to use (#2)

More network errors should now be gracefully handled without crashing (bug mentioned in #1).

Full changelog is available here: v1.3.0...v1.4.0.dev2

v1.3.0

ARver v1.3.0 release notes

This release focuses on "quality of life" improvements visible to the end user.

New features

• arver now verifies that specified audio files are matching CD Table of Contents. The number of files must match the number of CD tracks (excluding pregap track), and all tracks must have the same length.
  • Track number mismatch is always fatal.
  • Track length mismatch can be ignored with -p/--permissive command-line option (e.g. for handling trailing silence).
• New command-line option: -x/--exclude for ignoring files matching specified pattern:
  • Intended to ignore pregap tracks if files to verify are specified using a wildcard, e.g.: arver -x 00_pregap_track.flac *.flac
  • Can be specified multiple times. Supports wildcards.

Improvements

• FLAC processing is nearly twice as fast as in previous versions. ⚡
• Failures to download AccurateRip data will produce a user-friendly explanation. A rip info table will be displayed.
• README.md updates.

Behind the scenes

• Massive refactoring of the C extension. Code cleanup, renames, etc.
• New tests and improvements of existing tests.

Full changelog is available here: v1.2.0...v1.3.0

v1.2.0

ARver v1.2.0 release notes

New features

Mixed mode CD support. 💿

I only own two mixed mode CDs, so this is not tested as extensively as previous releases. However, differences between mixed mode and regular CDs are well understood, so testing I've done with my CDs should be sufficient. Detailed description of mixed mode CD handling was added to documentation.

All features postponed from v1.0.0 are now implemented.

Full changelog is available here: v1.1.0...v1.2.0

v1.1.0

ARver v1.1.0 release notes

New features

FLAC support: arver and arver-ripinfo can now read audio files in WAV and FLAC formats. 🎉

Processing FLAC files is slower than WAV files, but this is obvious since the audio file must first be uncompressed. Performance may be improved in future releases.

libsndfile bundled in ARver wheels has been updated to the latest version (1.2.2 at the time of writing) to provide a fix for CVE-2021-4156. Previous ARver versions are not affected, since they refuse to load FLAC files.

Bug fixes

• Invalid disc ID is no longer printed as a single-element list in error messages of arver and arver-discinfo.
• Animated usage example is now correctly displayed in the PyPI page.

Other changes

• arver now prints track checksums gradually as they are calculated.
• libsndfile version is reported in version strings.
• README.md updates.
• "Under the hood" changes:
  • code cleanup and refactoring,
  • new tests,
  • Docker container improvements.

Full changelog is available here: v1.0.0...v1.1.0

v1.0.0

ARver v1.0.0 release notes

It took a little over 14 months, ripping over 400 CDs (some of them multiple times with different rippers) and handling many edge cases which could only be discovered by testing with physical media.

It seems that the final 20% of work related to figuring out the details of Python packaging and releasing to PyPI took 80% of the total time... But it's finally ready! 🔥 🚀 💥

Postponed features

The following features are postponed to later releases:

• FLAC format support
• mixed-mode CD support

I don't consider either of these blocking, as v1.0.0 already accomplishes its intended goals.