Audex with new engine planned for 27.04

[Marco Nelles]

Hi everyone,


I'm Marco, the developer of Audex (and KEMU@ https://invent.kde.org/marcon/
kemu, but that's a different story for 2027) since 2007. You maybe have heard 
about this cdda ripping tool. It is part of KDE Gear.

Over the last 15 years I was rather reserved about the development of Audex. 
But that is actually only half of the truth, because behind the scenes I have 
been working on a new engine over the past 10 years for now (sometimes more, 
sometimes less). Due to personal reasons this has never reached production 
level, mainly because of the lack of GUI integration. The new extraction 
engine existed only in a minimal GUI application for testing.

But in the last few month I was able to build a symbiosis of this new engine 
and the well-known GUI of Audex. Youl'll find it in the "work/marcon/newengine" 
Branch in the Audex repo (https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/audex).
I don't want to sound like a marketing manager, but in terms of features, 
Audex really has the chance to catch up with the well-known major players on 
windows platforms for CD audio ripping jobs.

* New engine with direct SG_IO/MMC, full secure ripping mode, multiple drive 
support with drive calibration, offset correction, cache defeat, C2 error 
pointers, HTOA, Cuesheet, AccurateRip/CTDB repair, HDCD dectection, CD-G 
support, CD-RW detection, ...

Everyone is warmly invited to check it out an provide feedback. All CI 
pipelines are green on the newengine branch (Linux Qt6, FreeBSD, Flatpak, 
Snap).

One important note for portability: The new engine builds fine on FreeBSD (CI 
is green), but the actual CD extraction relies on Linux-specific SG_IO/MMC 
commands, so ripping itself is Linux-only for now. FreeBSD users get a clear 
runtime message. If anyone with FreeBSD CAM (pass(4)) experience is willing to 
help port the low-level drive layer, I'd very much appreciate it. I have 
designed the engine with platform abstraction in mind.

So, I'd really like to see Audex with the new engine in the upcoming 27.04 
release to its 20-years-birthday. I'm a little bit unsure about such a great 
merge into master (~80% rewritten), but my plan is:

1. I will open a draft merge request soon, so reviewers can already have a 
look. I'll rebase the branch every few weeks to keep the distance to master 
small.

2. After the branch cut for 26.12, I plan to merge it into master in December. 
The 26.12.x bugfix releases will continue on the current, proven codebase and 
are completely unaffected.

3. Right after the merge I'll send a heads-up to kde-i18n-doc at kde.org, since 
there will be many new strings to translate. That leaves about four months 
before the 27.04 freeze.

4. From December to March I'll have time to update the documentation and 
polish the release.

What do you think? Any hints or objections?


Thank you,

Marco