[linux-audio-announce] [ANN] Ecasound 2.4.4 released

[Kai Vehmanen]

First Ecasound release of 2006 is here!

1. Summary of changes
---------------------

A severe bug related to audio routing in the engine has been fixed. It is 
now possible to set initial values for any MIDI-CC controlled effect 
parameters. Many minor bugfixes and improvements have been made to the 
Ecasound Control Interface implementation. Some improvements have been 
also made to the ecasignalview utility.

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.

3. Changes since last release
-----------------------------

* A severe bug was fixed in the engine mixer code. In cases where an
   input is connected to multiple chains, and one or more inputs
   have reached end of stream state, the resulting mix is not
   handled properly.

* Ability to set initial values for MIDI-CC controlled effect
   parameters has been added. This allows to avoid initial jumps
   in the parameter values.

* New interactive mode commands: ai-describe, ao-describe, cop-describe
   and ctrl-describe commands. These commands allow describing session
   state using the Ecasound Option Syntax. See ecasound-iam(1) for
   detailed description.

* Many bugfixes that affect applications utilizing the Ecasound Control
   Interface (ECI).

* And more bugfixes, see the full list of changes.

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

4. Interface and configuration file changes
-------------------------------------------

None in this release.

5. Contributors to this release
-------------------------------

Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes

   * Stuart Allie [allies] (1)
       ECI-C parser overflow.
   * Markus Grabner [grabner] (1)
       Updated RPM spec-file for x86_64 support.

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

   * Junichi Uekawa (2)
       Bug in -etf operator.
       Comma-bug in ecasignalview.
   * Michael Willoughby (2)
       Bug in 'c-select'.
       Unnecessary DBC runtime check warnings.
   * Rocco <linuxmedia2 at netscape.n...> (1)
       Bug in the engine mixdown routines.
   * Pedro Antonio Fructuoso Merino (1)
       Bug in seeking mp3 files.
   * Dave Serls (1)
       Segfault related to preset object cleanup (sfbug:1412200).
   * Stephen Stocker (1)
       Ecasignalview compile error.

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

   * Adam Linson (1)
       Setting initial values for MIDI-controlled parameters.

6. Links and files
------------------

Web site (and mirrors):
 	http://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-2.4.4.tar.gz
 	md5sum: 3032a157f736bb38426b2ebcc92c6513

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

-- 
  links, my public keys, etc at http://eca.cx/kv