Release 0.29alpha1 is up on http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/rioplay/.

Not a whole bunch has changed from the user's perspective, except for the playlists (in the sense of the playlist of songs the Rio is going to play, not playlists stored on the server). The global playlist is now separated from the input sources, meaning you can enqueue both Rio/JRec served MP3s and Shoutcast streams into the playlist. This also means for instance that you could enqueue all songs by "Artist X" and then go back through the menus and enqueue all songs by "Artist Y" as well.

In addition, this release includes experimental FLAC support. Warning: this FLAC support is based on a version of libflac which has been hacked to fix a libflac bug. This causes it to be a noncompliant FLAC decoder, however it seems to work fine with every FLAC file I've tried. There will be an official fix for this bug in the next release of FLAC which we will then pick up for RioPlay so it can be a true compliant FLAC player. In order to play back FLAC files, you need JReceiver 0.2.3 and jrec_serv.war from this url: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jreceiver_user/files/. Then in the Rio driver settings, check the box for "Native FLAC support". Also don't forget to restart JReceiver after changing this setting.

This version has been tagged as "alpha" because of the non-compliant FLAC support and because I haven't done lots of extensive testing, however I think it's at least as stable as 0.28 was. Please let me know if you discover any problems.

Oh, and Random playback is now supported with 2 caveats: first is that I discovered that I forgot to add support for the Random panel button, so you must use the remote. The second is that pushing Random randomizes the Rio's playlist and currently there is no way to get back to a non randomized state. Pressing Random again will just re-randomize the playlist.