SoundConverter 2.0


Refactoring and Internal Changes
Time for a new release of SoundConverter. This one was long-delayed because of the changes I made to the code base. I wanted to split the source in several files, and this was long and painful, but I think it was worth it. The loading is faster, and the structure is much more clear now. It's still far from perfect, and more work is needed to totally finish the cleaning, but I'm happy with this release. Another big change is the simplification of many classes.

OK, enough talking about the internal changes since you don't care, and let's see what's new for you.




Important problems fixed
The Vorbis output was badly broken since a few releases, causing snapping in the converted files, this is fixed now.
Several crashes were fixed too.


Faster Adding
SoundConverter was sometimes slow and unresponsive when adding huge amount of files, because it tried to read tags the earliest it can. Now it reads the tags just before converting. And only if needed by the target filename renaming.

Adding files speed test. 16x faster!

After a seance of profiling, it was clear that adding file by file to the UI was slow, so now files are added only when we are done scanning them.

Adding files speed test. 3.5x faster!
The results speak for themselves, we went from 2 minutes down to 2 seconds. That's 60x faster!

New Filename Patterns
Speaking of filename, {Ext}, {DiscNumber} and {DiscTotal} were added to filename patterns. 

Interface Changes
When converting, progress bars now appear next to the files, so you can watch all the parallel processing occurring. That's what you are paying for, so it's important to see it :)


You can't see it in this early screenshot, but the preferences now have a dedicated toolbar icon. Hopefully this will allow SoundConverter to be usable in Ubuntu Unity...


Speed limiter
It's a bit ironic, as we were striving to get the maximum speed out of your hardware -and many of you are really happy with this- but alas some users were also complaining about overheating/crashes when SoundConverter used lots of processes for converting. If you were affected, rejoice, you can now limit the number of parallel conversions in the preference dialog.




Other Problems
We now exclude all files with .iso extension, since we can't read them...

Hurrah for Fedora
I've now to thanks the wonderful Fedora packaging team, for being so nice and patient with me. They fixed a few problems in their packages, but I was slow to integrate them. This is done now. Hopefully now, the Fedora packages should be vanilla SoundConverter packages, and releasing will be easier for everybody.


The Future
After this release I plan to fix the inevitable problems that will emerge, but the next big step is a total rewrite in python3, a brand new gtk3 interface. You guessed it, version 3!


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