Which version of FieldTrip should I download?

Although initially we considered to use semantic versioning with version 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, etc., we decided against it. We don’t have clear development milestones that would warrant a version increment, and we don’t want to break backward compatibility. Instead, we have a smooth development path and make changes from day to day. The latest version of the toolbox will generally work with your older scripts (and if not, please report it as a bug). When we add or change functionality in the code, we always test it using the dashboard prior to releasing it. There is a limited number of people that can directly change the code, and they take their responsibility to the other users very seriously.

We release a daily version of FieldTrip, with the name fieldtrip-YYYYMMDD, where YYYY, MM and DD are the year, month and day. Besides the normal release, there is also a lite version that does not contain the binary .mat files. These .mat files contain templates used for plotting and source reconstructions and they do not change very often. The lite version is only approximately 70 MiB, whereas the normal version (which includes the anatomical templates) is around 400 MiB.

In general, you should download the most recent daily release version. It contains the most features and all known bugs will be fixed in that version. If you encounter a problem and think that that is caused by a bug in the code, you should download the latest version at that moment. If the problem still persists, please inform us about it through the email discussion list or report it as a bug.

If you want to control in detail which version of FieldTrip you have, if you want to do frequent updates, or if you want to contribute, you should use the GitHub version.