A little while back I mentioned here that there were several xiph.org releases coming up. These did happen, and I flagged those packages out of date. Now that the openssl, heimdal, and icu updates are done, I'd like to know where these stand. Normally I'd not write such a "nag mail", but the only package with a soname bump (libao) is owned by an ex-developer (Hugo Doria), so I thought it might have been missed. I also had some extra details to provide. The full details of the upstream releases can be seen at http://xiph.org/press/2010/vorbis-surround/ and http://xiph.org/press/2010/libogg-1.2.0/ . Only libao has a soname bump; libogg and libvorbis have none. The new vorbis-tools also requires the new libao. libao isn't widely used, so it shouldn't be much of a rebuild. Another thing worth mentioning is that libao now (optionally) supports many more drivers/plugins out of the box. One of them is pulseaudio. This likely obsoletes the libao-pulse package currently in community. The only hassle here is not being able to do a straight split package since libao is in [extra] and libao-pulse (with pulseaudio itself) is is in [community]. That said, it should be workable to build the [extra] package entirely without pulseaudio support, and then build it again for the [community] package, installing only the pulse plugin from that PKGBUILD. libao seems happy enough to load any plugin it finds in its modules directory, whether or not they were built together (though I didn't test this with the pulse plugin in particular). vcut is now built by default (as upstream finally considers it ready for prime-time), so the explicit "--enable-vcut" can be removed from vorbis-tools' configure arguments. I've been using these upgrades since a few months before they were released, and they are solid. (Why am I personally so interested in these upgrades? One big feature, oddly missing from the release announcement, is that ogg123 now supports ReplayGain, making it a reasonable replacement for a bigger music player, at least for me. So vorbis-tools is the main driver as far as I'm concerned.)