Audex with new engine planned for 27.04

[Albert Astals Cid]

El divendres, 9 d’octubre del 2026, a les 9:00:18 (Hora d’estiu d’Europa 
central), Marco Nelles va escriure:
> 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.

Does the current code in master support FreeBSD for CD extraction?

> 
> 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?

Sounds exciting :)

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Marco