Old news:

• This release supports Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and Debian 10.
• Fixed a bug that might have caused a crash when a BWF or MP2 file had user entered metadata (text) in some other encoding than UTF-8.

2019.08.24 FreeLCS 3.6 released.

• This release supports Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and Debian 9 and 10.
• It is now possible to change target loudness in the range of -31 LUFS to -12 LUFS. This makes it possible to adjust loudness to a level that is more compatible with internet media sites (Youtube, Spotify, mobile devices, social media, etc). There are some things to be aware of when using higher than -23 LUFS target loudness levels. They are discussed here. Target loudness graphics is drawn using different colors depending on if target is set lower, equal or higher than -23 LUFS. Hotfolder name also changes depending on the selected target loudness.
• Loudness history graphics and html progress report now uses UTF-8 character encoding.
• Debian 10 has AppArmor turned on by default but this does not seem to affect FreeLCS installation in any way. This is further discussed in the FAQ here.

2018.05.25 FreeLCS 3.5 released.

• This release supports Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and Debian 8 and 9.
• Patents for Dolby AC3, Mpeg 1 Layers 1, 2 and 3 (mp1, mp2, mp3 ) have expired all over the world. These formats are now patent free and can be used legally without paying anybody for a license. These formats (and the Opus - format) are now enabled if you enable free formats during FreeLCS installation. Extracting audio from these formats still require installation of FFmpeg / Libav-tools.
• Libebur128 upgraded to the latest version 1.2.4. Libebur128 by default builds taglib into the 'loudness' executable. Taglib does not build cleanly anymore on older distros probably due to old gcc - versions. Because of this building taglib with libebur128 is disabled on Debian 8 and Ubuntu 16.04. Taglib is used to read and write metadata into files (For Example ID3 - data in mp3 files), so you probably don't need it for anything anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TagLib

2017.08.30 FreeLCS 3.4 released.

• This release supports Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and Debian 8 and 9.
• Libebur128 is upgraded to the latest version 1.2.2. The new version uses a new method to calculate true peak values. I'm testing each new FreeLCS release with the same set of  214 files (35 GB). 192 of them measure the same truepeak value as with the previous version of libebur128. The rest of them get mostly a lower truepeak value than before. Loudness measurement  with the new version of libebur128 gives the same results as before.
• Libebur128 version 1.2.2 source archive is included in the FreeLCS installation package. So now you don't have to have an internet connection while you install FreeLCS as long as you have access to a local Debian / Ubuntu package repository.
• Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 dropped the ram disk driver (brd module) from the kernel in the middle of the support cycle. Updated kernel does no longer include the brd module built in. Debian also does not load brd by default, so FreeLCS 3.4 now handles loading of the brd module automatically if the module is not loaded or built into kernel.
• If you need to disable the smb protocol version1 then remove the character # from smb.conf in front of line: # server min protocol = SMB2

• This release supports Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 and Debian 8. Support for Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian 7 is dropped.

• This release adds support for Debian 8 that introduces a new os startup system called systemd. Systemd introduces some changes to how the operating system is started up, so FreeLCS needed to adjust to these changes.
• FreeLCS 3.2 supports Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Debian 7 and Debian 8. IMPORTANT !!!!!!! Ubuntu 12.04 updates brings in a broken version of python3. Here are two possible solutions to the problem.
• Fixed a small bug: the HeartBeat_Checker program crashed if the computer started up and could not get an ip - address. What HeartBeat_Checker does is explained here.
• I stumbled upon a  problem with OS X versions 10.7 - 10.10 and their smb - protocol implementation. This causes problems when files are copied over from these OS X versions to the FreeLCS - server. I also found two workarounds, read more about it here.
• Ubuntu 12.04 updates brings in a broken version of python3. Here are two possible solutions to the problem.
• No changes to the processing of audio files.

• This minor update only fixes one bug that caused 3 - 4 unnecessary error messages per week complaining that the FreeLCS server could not find out what it's IP - address was. FreeLCS prints the IP - address of the server on the "Html progress report" and the server needs to check periodically if the IP - address has changed. No other changes to FreeLCS functionality in this release :)

• This new release adds major new features. If you are happy with your current FreeLCS 2.3 or 2.4 installation then there is no reason to upgrade :)
• Support for Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04 Server, Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop and Server added. Note that installation on Debian 7 and Ubuntu Server requires some modifications to the operating system configuration before installation.
• FreeLCS 3.0 is able to write loudness results to a machine readable file. With this feature you can make FreeLCS the loudness measurement step in your automated file processing workflow. You can also configure FreeLCS not to produce any output files (loudness corrected audio files, history graphics) since these might not be needed in an automated workflow.
• With FreeLCS 3.0 you can define how audio channels inside an MXF file will be combined to new mixes before loudness processing. The feature is called MXF audio remixing.
• FreeLCS is no longer tested with FFmpeg since FFmpeg is no longer easily available in Ubuntu 14.04 repositories. The only common tool easily avaible to Debian 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 users is avconv from libav-tools. FreeLCS 3.0 uses avconv if it is installed by the user. There is a small known problem with the avconv version that ships with Ubuntu 14.04 , read about it here.

• Libebur128 source code repository that FreeLCS uses during installation was reorganized by its author. The change broke installation for FreeLCS 2.3 and older. I uploaded my backup of original libebur128 source code to github and updated FreeLCS installer to install libebur128 from this new repository.
• All installations made before this change will continue to work fine, but new installations or restoring an old backup made with FreeLCS 2.3 backup-tool won't work anymore. All new installations must be done with version 2.4. Sorry for the inconvenience.
• If you made a backup of your server using the tool provided in FreeLCS 2.3 zip, then please download FreeLCS version 2.4 and make a new backup. The restore script in version 2.3 uses the original libebur128 repository and it does not work the way it used to when FreeLCS 2.3 was released.
• There is no new functionality in this release (though some new features are under development :)

• This is a maintenance bug fix release.
• Fixes a bug made in FreeLCS version 2.2 that affects only output files bigger than 4 GB. When the output file was split to separate mono channels, some channels were missing.
• Fixed a number of ways LoudnessCorrection.py could be crashed by deleting files that it was already processing.
• Added a new script to backup / clone FreeLCS installation to another Ubuntu machine. The script does not require X and can be used over a ssh - connection. This functionality can be used to create automation that clones FreeLCS installation to several machines quickly and easily. Read about it here.

• This is a maintenance bug fix release. This version fixes a couple of bugs that sometimes caused file processing to hang. This release also adds code that catches possible Python error messages and sends them to the user. This helps to identify what situation caused the error.
• Addition to the manual "How to synchronize server clock to a NTP server".
• Correction to manual: "Use UUID as the device name when configuring software raid". This solves the problem where raid device number sometimes changes when a kernel update is installed.
• The installer no longer installs FFmpeg, but if the user does, then FFmpeg is used for file processing.

• This release fixes a bug: bit depth was not preserved if input file had many audio streams with uncompressed audio in it.

• This is an important bug fix release and everybody should upgrade.
• Fixes a large number of bugs and undesired behaviors in FreeLCS and includes several enhancements.
  
• Fixes a couple of problems in helper programs libebur128 and sox. The sox version 14.3.2 that comes with Ubuntu 12.04 is not able to handle bigger than 4 GB files correctly. FreeLCS installer now downloads sox source code and compiles and installs version 14.4.0 that fixes the problem.
• Supported channel orders are now defined (see FAQ).
  
• Libebur128 is patched to support channel orders: 4.0 (L, R, LS, RS) and 5.0 (L, R, C, LFE, LS, RS). These were previously not supported.
• Libebur128 developer fixed a bug that caused loudness calculation to hang when processing lots of very short files.
  
• Behaviour for files bigger than 4 GB is now defined (see FAQ).
• Complete log of all changes is in the changelog.