[linux-audio-announce] [ANN] Ecasound 2.4.1 released

[Kai Vehmanen]

1. Summary of changes

aRts-plugin was added back to the distribution package and code
for mp3 header parsing was rewritten. A new playlist mode was
added to ecaplay. Many updates have been made to user and 
programmer documentation.

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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.

Primary platform for running Ecasound is GNU/Linux. Ecasound can 
also be run on many UNIX-derived systems such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X 
and Solaris. Limited support for Windows is available through 
Cygwin. 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

* Sources for the aRts plugin were accidentally left out from
   the v2.4.0 release. This release again has the plugin.

* The mp3 header parsing code has been partially written. This
   fixes various problems in using mp3 files with broken or
   uncommon header layout and contents.

* In addition to numerous minor bugfixes, a playlist mode has
   been added to ecaplay. See the following ecasound-list post:
   http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2005/03/0027.html

* Minor new features: ability to reset ecasignalview peak
   statistics by sending a SIGHUP signal to the process,
   extended support for describing effect preset parameters (see
   the User's Guide for details).

* Various build system improvements: compile errors with
   egcs-2.91.66, updated to new versions of autoconf and automake,
   fixed compiling outside the main source directory, added
   the ability to define a custom pkgdatadir at make time.

* Documentation updates: new sections to the INSTALL file,
   many updates to the Ecasound Programmer's Guide and new
   sections to the User's Guide.

* Bug fixes: serious bug in -gc (crop gate) operator,
   problems in parsing LADSPA plugins such as the SCx
   compressors which have colon characters in their
   port descriptions.

Full list of changes is available at:
  - http://www.eca.cx/ecasound/history.php.

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4. Interface and configuration file changes

* Note to distribution package maintainers:

   The Ecasound Programming Guide has been rewritten in
   plain ascii (used to be LaTeX) with optional support for
   reStructured text. I recommended packaging only the
   ascii version (ecasound_programmers_guide.txt) to the
   distribution package. Although there are make rules for
   creating the html version with rst2html (from python-docutils
   package), these are not meant for general use.

   There have been no changes to the other manuals (ECI and
   User's guides).

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5. Contributors to this release

Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes

   * Julian Dobson, Kai Vehmanen (1)
       Improved mechanism for mp3 header parsing.
   * Alexey Shchepin (1)
       Fix to a bug in time crop gate operator (-gc).
   * Junichi Uekawa (1)
       Support for specifying custom datadir forecasoundrc.

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

   * Brad Fuller (1)
       Output to stdout even though -q has been specified
   * Adam Linson (1)
       Errors in ecasound-iam manpage.
   * Junichi Uekawa (1)
       aRts support was missing from 2.4.0 release.

Feature suggestions - Ideas that led to new features (items)

   * Peter Lutek (1):
       Ability to reset ecasignalview peak statistic

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6. Links and files

Web site (and mirrors):
 	http://www.eca.cx (fi)
 	http://ecasound.seul.org (us)
 	http://ecasound.sourceforge.net (us)

Source packages:
 	http://ecasound.seul.org/download
 	http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.4.1.tar.gz
 	md5sum: 48b75215252d21dddf5216cae27a5f4b

List of distributions with maintained Ecasound support:
 	See http://www.eca.cx/download.php

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