Burn to the Brim: History

v4.7.0 — Interactive Translated Tutorial, Resizable Layouts & Splitter Bar June 12, 2026

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Interactive Multi-Language Tutorial: Introduced an interactive modal tutorial showcasing BTTB's main features (Source, Target, Semantic Prompt, Packing Options, Results tree, and solver actions) without executing any file operations. Fully translated into all 13 supported languages.
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Win32 Resizable Window & Drag Splitter: Upgraded the native Windows GUI to support resizable overlapping windows and a mouse-draggable splitter bar allowing users to dynamically adjust the width of the TreeView results panel.
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Linux/GTK4 Context Menu Popover: Linux right-clicks on Results TreeView now display a native GtkPopover menu asking to confirm the restore operation before execution.
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Preferences Button Alignment Polish: Wraps preferences layouts in scrolled panels and pins the OK/Cancel buttons at the bottom of the window.

v4.6.0 — Windows Unicode Display Polish, Original Path Outputs & TreeView Restoration June 11, 2026

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Windows Unicode Display Fix: Solved regional character display corruption (question marks) in language selection comboboxes and dialog screens under Windows for Chinese, Japanese, and Elvish locales by adopting Unicode window creations and SendMessageW string passing.
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Original Absolute Paths Tracking: Outputs the original absolute file path of packed items in a flat "originalPath" field within the solved index.json.
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Skipped Items TreeView Nodes: Renders skipped files/folders under a dedicated "Skipped Items" node category in the Results TreeView (GTK4 and Win32).
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TreeView Copy-Restoration: Added a right-click context menu option ("Restore to Original Location") inside Results TreeViews to copy/restore files/folders back to their original disk locations.
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Search Time Bounds Check: Enforces a 30s backtracking limit fallback if the maximum search time parameter is set to 0 or less.
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13-Language Website Translating: Full multi-language translation support extended to the overview.html pages with an integrated language selection bar.

v4.5.0 — Brand Identity Refresh & High-Resolution Graphics June 9, 2026

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New Application Icon: Replaced the old application icon with a brand new, high-quality multi-resolution icon (bttb.ico) supporting all standard Windows display sizes from 16x16 up to 256x256.
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Website Logo Upgrade: Replaced the legacy low-resolution BTTBIcon.gif / bttbicon.gif with the modern high-resolution bttb.png across all pages, manuals, and online resources.

v4.4.1 — Win32 Stack Overflow & Log Truncation Fixes June 9, 2026

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Win32 Stack Overflow Fix: Solved Windows native GUI crash (0xC00000FD) during deep backtracking recursive solver runs by minimizing recursive stack frame sizes and configuring a default 16MB thread stack limit.
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Log Truncation Fix: Solved log output truncation by increasing the multi-line edit control text buffer limit to 10MB using the EM_SETLIMITTEXT API.

v4.4.0 — Non-Blocking Tree Rendering, Interactive Capacity Warnings & Skipped Files June 7, 2026

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Non-Blocking Tree Rendering: Solved GUI freezes on large datasets by inserting tree items incrementally in background batches of 100 using idle handlers (GTK) and custom windows message loop batching (Win32).
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Interactive Resize/Skip Warnings: Added multi-choice warnings letting the user automatically adapt volume size, skip larger files, or cancel.
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Skipped Files Log: Exports skipped files to a root-level "Skipped" array of absolute paths in the generated index.json.
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Fractional MB Capacity Precision: Added robust parsing and precise formatting for small/fractional MB capacities (e.g. 180KB or 0.18MB) working seamlessly across decimal locales.

v4.3.0 — Modular Localization, PO Translations & Dynamic GUI Languages June 6, 2026

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Modular PO Translations: Introduced a modular locale manager class parsing GNU Gettext .po files natively without runtime external gettext dependencies.
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Multi-Language Bundles: Released default translations for German (de), Dutch (nl), French (fr), and Spanish (es) located in the lang/ subdirectory.
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Default System Locale Detection: Automatically assumes the locale of the host machine upon first start, falling back gracefully to embedded English strings.
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Dynamic Preference Combo Box: Integrated language selection dropdown comboboxes inside Settings (GTK4) and Preferences (Win32) screens to dynamically load and save configuration parameters.
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Win32 Newline Conversions: Formatted multiline tooltips and About text boxes with native CRLF conversion heuristics.

v4.2.0 — Offline JSON Index & PAR3 Parity Protection June 1, 2026

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JSON Index Generation: Automatically outputs an index.json metadata catalog containing relative paths, file sizes, and dates across all volumes in the solved target folder.
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JSON Token Parser UI: Implemented a fast offline tokenizer parser natively integrated in Windows/Linux Results Trees to easily browse previously packed multi-volume setups.
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Cauchy Reed-Solomon PAR3 Parity: Fully integrated libpar3 for optional parity archive creation (with real-time sector-overhead bound backtracking sizing checks).
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Bit-Rot Verification & Copy-Restoration: Natively verify multi-volume files and symlinks against PAR3 parity archives, listing errors, and restoring clean files to a safe copy directory.

v4.1.1 — Dark Theme, Early Estimates & Win32 Styling Polish May 31, 2026

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Native Theme Selection & Dark Theme: Integrated native theme selectors with modern dark theme styles across Windows Win32 and Linux GTK4 platforms.
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Improved Startup Time Left Estimates: Restructured solver execution to trigger Estimated Time Left updates immediately upon starting directory scans, avoiding "Calculating..." delays.
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Win32 Control Styling Polish: Styled standard Win32 edit boxes, checkboxes, dialogs, and static labels to support a complete, cohesive Dark Mode.

v4.1.0 — Settings Memory, Named Custom Volumes, Auto Sizing & Rules Overrides May 30, 2026

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Structured Settings Memory: Cleanly persists target capacities, sector sizes, slack volumes, and preferences in a structured, cross-platform settings.txt config file across sessions.
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Named Custom Volume Profiles: Allows users to create named custom volume capacity profiles, automatically populating the media combo selector on startup.
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Dynamic Auto Size Profile: Scans items in a two-pass pass to set the target volume capacity exactly to the sector-aligned size of the largest indivisible file or consolidated rules group.
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Rule Precedence Toggle: Added a settings checkbox/switch preference letting wildcard-matching pattern rules take priority and win over neural semantic clustering.
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Estimated Time Left Counter: Implemented actual disk transfer-rate tracking inside the solver file operations loop to display a live, high-accuracy Estimated Time Left countdown.
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Animated Activity Status Spinner: Added active graphical spinners (GTK4 GtkSpinner) and text spinners (Win32 static timer chars) showing live busy activity during solver executions.
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Premium Accessibility Tooltips: Bound premium context-aware on-hover tooltips to all main window buttons and preference options under both GTK4 and Win32 layouts.
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Native Win32 About dialog: Replaced plain MessageBox dialogs with a professional natively subclassed modal About window displaying high-res application icon resources.

v4.0.0 — Entropy-Aware Semantic Packing, Interactive Test Simulation Mode & Python Subprocesses May 27, 2026

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Entropy-Aware Semantic Packing: Introduced advanced machine learning semantic clustering using Hugging Face's all-MiniLM-L6-v2 transformer model. Groups files and folders by semantic coherence and contextual relevance prior to solver backtracking.
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Safe Subprocess Architecture: Designed a resilient python JSON-IPC subprocess architecture to execute heavy neural networks outside the native C++ binary, ensuring a lightweight binary footprint under 1MB.
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Zero-Dependency Embedding Fallback: Provided a self-contained, lightweight TF-IDF n-gram vectorizer fallback in the absence of PyTorch or sentence-transformers, alongside a local string similarity algorithm in pure C++ if Python is missing.
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Interactive Test Simulation Mode: Added a dedicated non-destructive "Test" button and command-line --test simulation mode. Simulates packing on virtual clusters, calculates volume slack and average pairwise cosine coherence metrics, and reports results with zero disk write side-effects.
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CLI Semantic Flags: Upgraded the hybrid CLI parser to support --semantic "" and --test directly from terminal shells.
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Release Packaging & Installer Upgrades: Configured automated packaging of bttb_embed.py within native Debian (.deb) installers and Nullsoft Setup (.exe) installers, alongside a bumped 4.0.0 version configuration.

v3.3.0 — Unicode Long Paths, Setup Installers, Shell Context Menus & Hybrid GUI/CLI May 25, 2026

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Unicode & Long Path Support (>256 chars): Extended BTTB to support filenames and paths of arbitrary length (using absolute normalization and \\?\ prefixes on Windows) with full wide Unicode parsing.
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Graceful System File Scans: Added clean exception handling and user prompts to skip unreadable files or abort processing during the directory traversal.
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Native Setup Installer (Windows): Designed and compiled a clean `.exe` setup installer using NSIS to package the application with desktop/Start Menu shortcuts and complete uninstall options.
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Explorer Context Menu & IPC Appending: Allowed optional context menu integration under Windows. Active single-instance IPC appends subsequent folders to the main window list box and focuses the application.
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Integrated Hybrid GUI/CLI: Unified the GUI and CLI binaries on both platforms. Command line flags trigger high-performance attached console modes, whereas launching without arguments (or with -gui) loads the UI.
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Smart Adaptive Capacity Warning: Prompts the user via CLI or visual dialogs to automatically increase target capacity to fit abnormally large scanned files and retries packing seamlessly.
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About Screen & Metadata: Updated internal metadata resources and the visual About Box for both platforms to version 3.3.0.
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Debian Installer Package (.deb): Added native Debian packaging support for Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 25.04, and 26.04 out of the box using custom low-level symbol wrapping and static compiler runtimes to ensure dynamic backwards compatibility (GLIBC requirement lowered to 2.35).

v3.2.0 — Multiple Directories, Symbolic Links & Win32 TreeView Explorer May 25, 2026

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Multiple Source Directories Setup (+): Added support to select and scan multiple source base folders. Nested folders are automatically filtered and ignored, allowing BTTB to act as if they are located under a single virtual root folder.
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Lightweight Symbolic Link Outputs: Introduced a new option to create lightweight symbolic links in the destination folder instead of copying or moving original files. Supports Windows native CreateSymbolicLink API, mklink shell commands, and robust copy fallback on failure.
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Standard TreeView Results Explorer: Ported the left-side hierarchical tree view explorer to the Windows native Win32 SDK build, displaying solved volumes and unfitted remaining items in a beautiful standard control.
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Dynamic Size Suffixed Capacity Input: Enhanced the custom size entry field to support fractional suffixes (e.g. 512MB, 2.5GB, 1.5TB) and displays the calculated size in real-time in MB. Added 256GB and 512GB presets.
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Built-in Help System: Added a native Help button displaying a beautifully detailed guide to help users understand search times, split depth, slack tolerances, and symbolic links.
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Packaged binary releases (`build/bttb-cpp-3.2.0-Linux-GTK4.zip`, `build/bttb-cpp-3.2.0-Win64-Native-GUI.zip`) and unified source release (`build/bttb-cpp-3.2.0-source-unified.zip`).

v3.1.2 — Slack Optimizations & Unified Windows GUI Features May 25, 2026

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Slack-Capacity Early Termination: Integrated a highly optimized early-exit condition that completes searches on high-slack datasets instantly (solving combinatorial complexity issues where searching takes more than 10 seconds).
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Unified Preferences on Windows: Completely ported all settings screens from the Linux GTK 4 version to the Windows native Win32 SDK build, including Max Search Time and standard wildcard/regex file/folder Grouping Rules list, match modes, and Add/Delete rules controls.
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Visual Thinking Progress in GUI: Added a trace checkbox in both GUIs, enabling real-time step progress visual trace so users can see the backtracking solver's decisions and branch-prunings as they happen.
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Thread-Safety State Reset: Fixed a state corruption issue where aborted spanning solver runs left residual selected flags on files by resetting selection states at the start of each volume iteration.
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Packaged binary releases (`build/bttb-cpp-3.1.2-Linux.tar.gz`, `build/bttb-cpp-3.1.2-Linux-GTK4.zip`, `build/bttb-cpp-3.1.2-Win64-Native-GUI.zip`) and unified source release (`build/bttb-cpp-3.1.2-source-unified.zip`).

v3.1.1 — Analytical Solver Tracing & Performance Metrics May 24, 2026

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Added `enableTrace` option to the recursive knapsack backtracking algorithm, rendering real-time pruning and exploration step milestones.
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Implemented theoretical pre-solving capacity volume estimations, indicating required volumes prior to solving.
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Added detailed performance summaries upon solver completion: total states explored, branches pruned, and mathematical search pruning efficiency.
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Upgraded automated verification suite to execute comprehensive, recursively-split Multi-Volume Spanning tests on 60MB file systems.
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Packaged binary releases (`build/bttb-cpp-3.1.1-Linux.tar.gz`, `build/bttb-cpp-3.1.1-Linux-GTK4.zip`, `build/bttb-cpp-3.1.1-Win64-Native-GUI.zip`) and unified source release (`build/bttb-cpp-3.1.1-source-unified.zip`).

v3.1.0 — High-Capacity BD/USB Support & Spanning Engine May 24, 2026

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Added native built-in capacity presets for Blu-ray discs (BD 25 GB and BD DL 50 GB) using 2048-byte sector dimensions.
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Added native presets for USB Flash Drives (8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB) configured automatically to 4096-byte clusters.
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Implemented Multi-Volume Spanning Engine in the C++20 backtracking solver, iteratively packing large folder structures into optimal Volume subsets.
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Redesigned the Linux GTK 4 results tree list to group files dynamically under nested volume parent nodes.
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Upgraded Windows Win32 native GUI layout to dynamically adjust dimensions and prevent overlapping controls with the new Spanning settings.
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Packaged standalone Windows native release zip and unified source release zip for SourceForge.

v3.0.0 — Complete C++20 Redesign May 24, 2026

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Blazing-fast, thread-safe recursive backtracking solver rewritten in standard C++20.
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New modern Linux desktop GUI utilizing the GTK 4 (GNOME Adwaita) visual framework.
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New lightweight, statically-linked Windows Win32 SDK GUI (~160KB standalone executable, 100% GPL license-compliant).
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Added directory split-depth parameters to control granular scanning boundaries.
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Implemented regex-based rule grouping configurations to compile related files and folders.
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Fully integrated native modal ISO Image Creation utilities using genisoimage/mkisofs pipeline runs.
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Retired legacy ASPI driver dependencies, completely eliminating startup crashes on modern 64-bit systems.

v2.3 — DVD Support Delphi Legacy

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BTTB supports GB sizes to organize files natively on DVD media.
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Comprehensive source code cleanup and memory optimization.

v2.2 — BTTB goes GPL! Delphi Legacy

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Released as open source under the GNU GPL umbrella! Project uploaded to SourceForge.
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Resolved an issue where physical file deletion via hotkey failed on specific directory boundaries.

v2.0 — Drag & Burn / Groups Delphi Legacy

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Drag and drop selections from BTTB straight into your burning software.
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Group items dynamically by filename matching or MP3 Genre tags.
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CD autodetection capability to read available disk bytes.
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Redesigned, detailed help file.
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Workaround for directory moving issues caused by Windows SHFileOp API boundaries.

v1.2 — Nice GUI & Moving Delphi Legacy

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Switched from simple console output to a multi-window GUI.
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Added file moving and folder segregation options.

v1.0 — Initial Launch Delphi Legacy

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Initial published command-line version with standard CD74 matching.

Release History