When will it be released?

I'm specificaly after the new version of FMOD, which I've heard has several improvments (such as addind the musicorder command which would help me alot).

the musicorder fix is one of the things im looking forward to.

but what i would really like to see fixed in the next version is the handling of sounds in specialevents, movers, and triggerlights. In specialevents played sounds dont loop anymore like they were supposed to be in galaxy, in movers the ambientsounds refuse to play during moving, and at last the most annoying of them all is that triggerlight sounds play at ALL times, meaning things like alarms or laser fences will always make sound despite being disabled.

All these should be fixed already, if I recall well.

nope, has been included in 227.

Will the UT crew be getting the updated (227i) audio renderers ?

Wilko

I may well end-up holding things up though, as I have been having serious issues with the new audio renderers, and am collecting logs and screenshots of each config change.

Currently I can not get Music and FX and surround-sound.
Only Music and FX, or FX and surround.
I've tried Hard and Software modes, with FMod and OpenAL.
I can get it to behave better if I force it to Wav-out instead of DSound, but then I get crackles on some sounds.

Anyway, that's for another thread 

OpenAL still uses old FMod, I don't think that I want to touch music output at this point again. If I'd use another music lib, then it would be probably something free, maybe even MikMod. Back then MikMod was pretty dead so I had no real choice but to use FMod, but fortunately it's alive again.

SWFMod uses FModEX, maybe can port this too then.

Will have to ask probably Anth for ACE whitelisting.

maybe, but that's not even the question.
Over the years we had to find out a lot of things, added functions and all was tested and tested. I have to admit that the more tricky part is the sound output, not the music, still any new implementation requires not only the work to build it in, it also requires some people willing to test it for some time. New bugs always have to be expected.
Unfortunately testing can be also a lot of work and not many testers are left.
Aside this "general" problem with new stuff is bass also not free, so what would be the benefit of using it? Only a very very few tracks seem to be played slightly different with FMod compared to Galaxy, and it's so minor that most people don't even notice it. So I see a lot of work and little gain- and that although I use XMPlay for years now and I'm very satisfied with it.

I don't know, in theory anyone could try to do some different implementation, OpenAL is not part of the closed source, since I wrote it myself and that long before I even got the NDA.

Personally I'd only give it another try with libmikmod it's free and still new features are added, can be used basically in any platform as well.