[roann]

It has been a long time since the last release of Trader's Little Helper. As some of you know there was *a lot* of trouble in my life over the last months. Because of serious health problems I had to stop working on Trader's Little Helper shortly after the release of the last version. That were the bad news.

And here are the good news. Those "dark days" seem to be nearly over now. I'm back home again and the doctors finally allowed me to run my computers again. So I continued working on Trader's Little Helper ... and >here < is the new one: version 1.0.0 beta 1 (build 72).

Some notes (please read them):

(1) *Any* version of Trader's Little Helper prior to this new release must be uninstalled before you can install version 1.0.0 beta 1.

(2) Most wanted feature ... the page 'Encode files' is now implemented with a lot of options (encoding level, align on sector boundaries, test encoded files, create checksum file after encoding, and more). Hope you like it.

(3) All versions of Trader's Little Helper prior to the new one verify ffp files by comparing the flac fingerprints in the checksum file to the ones stored in the flac file headers (because that's the way metaflac.exe works). No checking of the audio content of the flac file is done. So verifying ffp files is *not* save at all: audio data can be corrupt but not the ffp stored in the header, and vice versa.
There's a new option 'Full ffp vrf.' on the 'Verify checksum files' page. If you check this option the old way of verifying is performed plus a re-calculation of the ffp which is checked against that in the flac file header. Now ffp verifying is save, but checksum re-calculating takes some time (same as verifying a .st5 checksum) ... so you have to be patient if you want "saver verifying".

(4) It's now possible to verify multiple checksum files. Because of the resulting space problems on the 'Verify ...' page the box showing the contents of a checksum file needed to be removed. Nevertheless you can take a look at a file's contents: just double-click on the file name in the list and a new window showing the contents will pop up.

(5) Adding files to create a checksum file for was completely reworked. You can now select all files in a directory, even all files in the subdirectories of that directory. Check it out!

(6) In the system menu of Trader's Little Helper a 'Preferences' dialog was inplemented. In this dialog you can change some of the default settings (startup page, directories, message boxes).

(7) Shell integration of Trader's Little Helper into Windows Explorer has been reworked and extended. A lot of function are available via Explorer's context menus.

(8) Drag & drop now works for verify, decode and encode.

(9) There's a new option 'Test decoded files for mp3' on the 'Decode files' page. It's the free command-line tool 'aucdtect.exe' that's called when you check this option. If you don't know this tool do *not* expect too much. It's a very good prog when it comes to studio recordings (that's the reason for *me* to integrate it). With live recordings it has its problems. So if you want to use it with live recordings only use it as a last step in your analysis. Spectral/frequency analysis is very important as is lineage ...

And remember ... Trader's Little Helper is still in beta. Thanks for all the feedback over the last months.

Cheers
Robert