[linux-audio-announce] [ANN] Ecasound 2.3.3 released

[Kai Vehmanen]

Hello all,

this year's first stable Ecasound release is now out!

Most of the final tuning for this release was done last Sunday while
watching and listening to the last sessions of 'laconf2'.  Many thanks to
all the organizers and participants! And special thanks for the
excellant net coverage of the event!

But now, back to the 2.3.3 release -- here are the details: 

1. Summary of changes

Bugs in ecasignalview, effect presets, NetECI protocol parser
and the C ECI implementation have been fixed. Many build system 
issues, including errors in building against libsndfile-1.0.4 
and older, have been resolved. A separate section covering 
ecasound.el, the ecasound emacs interface, has been added to 
the Ecasound Control Interface Guide. The Ecasound User's Guide 
has also been updated.

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2. What is Ecasound?

Ecasound is a software package designed for multitrack audio
processing. It can be used for simple tasks like audio playback, 
recording and format conversions, as well as for multitrack effect 
processing, mixing, recording and signal recycling. Ecasound supports 
a wide range of audio inputs, outputs and effect algorithms. 
Effects and audio objects can be combined in various ways, and their
parameters can be controlled by operator objects like oscillators 
and MIDI-CCs. A versatile console mode user-interface is included 
in the package.

Ecasound is licensed under the GPL. The Ecasound Control Interface 
(ECI) is licensed under the LGPL.

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3. Changes since last release

* Preset handling fixes: When saving chainsetups containing 
  presets, values of preset parameters were not saved correctly. 
  Also problems with presets containing untitled parameters have
  been fixed.

* New ecasoundrc(5) setting "autodetect" for "default-output" 
  has been added. When selected, libecasound will check for
  JACK support and whether a JACK server is running, if not
  found, check for ALSA, then OSS, and finally fallback to
  using "rtnull". This feature is especially useful to apps
  such as ecaplay.

* Fixes to ecasignalview: Proper cleanup after receiving an
  interrupt from keyboard (SIGINT/CTRL-C) has been added. 
  Originally tested on FreeBSD, but helps on Linux as well.

* Ecasound Interactive Mode (EIAM) updates: Added new 
  command 'map-ladspa-id-list' to allow listing the available
  plugins by their unique ID numbers. A special case
  value of '-1' is now understood by 'cs-set-length'. This
  allows undoing any previously set length value.

* Ecasound Control Interface (ECI) updates: Added a section 
  on ecasound.el - the Ecasound emacs interface - to the
  ECI Guide [1]. Several bugs have been fixed in the ECI 
  C implementation. A serious bug in NetECI protocol parser,
  that caused parsing long (over 32 chars) commands to fail,
  has also been fixed.

* Documentation updates: The Ecasound User's Guide [2] has
  been updated. Also, a bug in the groff source for the 
  ecasound(1) man page that prevented man from showing the 
  last five pages of the document, has been fixed. 

* Build system fixes: Problems in building against libsndfile-1.0.4 
  and older have been fixed. 'libecasound-config --libs' has been 
  fixed to return the full list of external libraries. Based 
  on recent discussions on linux-audio-dev, minor changes have
  been made to processing CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
  
Full list of changes is available at 
<http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>.

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4. Interface and configuration file changes

* ecasoundrc(5) - "default-output": new value "autodetect" (default)

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5. Contributors

Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes

	Michael Ewe (2) -- bugfixes to ecasignalview and ECI C impl
	Mario Lang (1) -- section on ecasound.el to ECI Guide
        Eric Rzewnicki (1) -- set of updates to Ecasound User's Guide
	Kai Vehmanen (n/a) -- various

Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed)

	Pierre Lorenzon (1) -- bugs in ecasound's daemon-mode 
			       protocol parser
	Jan Weil (1) -- cs-save dit not save preset parameters

Feature suggestions - Ideas that led to new features (items)
	
	Jan Weil (2) -- map-ladspa-id-list command, -t:1 option

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6. Links and files
   
Web sites:
	http://www.eca.cx
	http://www.eca.cx/ecasound

Source packages:
	http://ecasound.seul.org/download
	http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.3.3.tar.gz

Referenced documents:
        [1] - http://www.eca.cx/eci-guide
        [2] - http://www.eca.cx/eca-u-guide

Distributions with maintained Ecasound support:
	Agnula - http://www.agnula.org
	AltLinux - http://www.altlinux.com
	Debian - http://www.debian.org
	FreeBSD - http://www.freebsd.org/ports/audio.html
	Gentoo Linux - http://www.gentoo.org
	Mandrake - http://www.mandrake.org
	PLD Linux - http://www.pld.org.pl
	SuSE Linux -  http://www.suse.de/en

Contrib Packages and Add-On Distributions:
	AudioSlack for Slackware - http://www.audioslack.com
	PlanetCCRMA for RedHat/Fedora 
	    - http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software
	Thac's RPMs for Mandrake - http://rpm.nyvalls.se
	
Note! Distributors do not necessarily provide packages for 
      the very latest Ecasound version.

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 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!