There are official release versions which are named fieldtrip-x.y.z. These releases were made for the F.C. Donders Toolkit course and were also used in making the tutorial documentation which is available online. Since the toolkit course is only given once a year, the latest numbered release version tends to be pretty old.

There are also daily releases, with the name fieldtrip-YYYYMMDD, where YYYY, MM and DD are the year, month and day. These are automatically generated every day, and contain the most up-to-date code. Besides the normal daily release, there is also a lite version that does not contain the binary *.mat files. These mat files contain templates used for plotting source reconstructions and they do not change very often. The lite version is only approximately 13 MiB, whereas the normal version is around 55 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 of that moment. If the problem still persists, please inform us about it through the email discussion list.

If you want to use Fieldtrip inside the F.C. Donders Centre, you should not use the ftp version. Instead you should add h:\common\matlab\fieldtrip (on windows) or /home/common/matlab/fieldtrip (on linux) to your Matlab path. The common version on our network contains more functionality than the external ftp version (e.g. new experimental algorithms) and is immediately updated whenever a bug is found. That is also the reason why you should add that directory to your path, and not make your own copy (otherwise you would not benefit from updates by other people).

If you work at the F.C. Donders but you want to do your computations on your laptop or at home, or if you want to share FieldTrip with one of your external collaborators, you should use the ftp version. We do not want the internal experimental version to be used outside the F.C. Donders.

The FieldTrip source code and example datasets are released to the general public on our ftp server. If you have difficulties using the ftp server (especially using a OSX or linux command line ftp client), you can try to turn off “Extended Passive Mode” by typing “epsv”.