[LAA] [ANN] Ecasound 2.5.0 released

Kai Vehmanen kvehmanen at eca.cx
Sat Aug 16 19:18:22 EDT 2008


Hello all,

Ecasound 2.5.0 has been released! Releases notes follow:

1. Summary of changes in this release
-------------------------------------

A set of new input types, including a tone generator, audio looper, 
selector and sequencer ("playat"), have been added. Ecasound EWF file 
support has gone through a major refactoring. Threshold gate functionality 
has been extended. The Ecasound Emacs mode has been updated with more ECI 
commands. The usual set of bugs have been fixed.

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 in 2.5.x series
--------------------------------

v2.5.0:

* Added a new audio looper object. For instance "-i:audioloop,foo.wav"
   will play "foo.wav" and loop it indefinitely. See http://eca.cx/examples
   and ecasound(1) man page for more information.

* Added a new audio selector object. Specifying
   "-i:select,5,15.2,foo.wav" will play out 15.2sec of
   "foo.wav", starting at position 5sec (i.e. selects range
   5.0-20.2sec). See http://eca.cx/examples and ecasound(1)
   man page for more information.

* Added a new sequencer object that allows to play audio
   clips at a given position. Specifying
   "-i:playat,25.0,foo.wav" will play out "foo.wav"
   starting at position 25.0sec (i.e. the first 25.0secs
   will be silent and then "foo.wav" is played from
   the beginning). See http://eca.cx/examples and ecasound(1)
   man page for more information.

* Ability to stack audio objects. For instance
   "-i audioloop,reverse,select,10,15,foo.wav" will loop
   a reversed 15sec segment taken from 10sec onwards
   from 'file.wav'.

* Code for Ecasound Wave Files (EWF) has been mostly rewritten
   to fix longstanding bugs and design issues. This release also
   marks the ability to write to EWF files as a deprecated feature
   that will be removed in a later release. One new feature is
   the ability to specify parameters in terms of samples instead
   of seconds.

* Added a simple tone generator object. For example '-i:tone,sine,440,10.3'
   will produce a 440Hz sine tone with duration of 10.3 seconds. This input
   type will be especially useful for reproducing bugs in complicated
   chainsetups, without the need to exchange complete session data (which
   usually are composed of large amounts of audio files).

* Added 'reopen-count' parameter to threshold gate (-ge) operator.
   For instance when recording vinyl/tapes, this allows to automatically
   restart recording when a new track is started. When the gate is
   closed, no audio is passed through to the output file, but
   otherwise recording is kept running. Patch from Andrew Lees.

* Major update to the "Ecasound Examples": http://eca.cx/examples

* Updates to ecasound.el (ecasound emacs mode): new ECI commands
   exported.

* Various bugs (in runtime functionality, documentation as well as
   build issues) have been fixed.

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

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

The interactive mode commands 'cop-add' and 'ctrl-add' now allow 
aternate syntax: both "-<id_string>:par1,...,parN" and 
"<id_string>:par1,...,parN" are now accepted. So while previously 
only "cop-add -efl:400" was recognized, now programs can 
also use the more sane looking "cop-add efl:400" variant.

Output of "cs-status" (aka "status", "st") command has 
changed. More details are now printed about active chainsetups, 
while inactive setups are just listed. Previously one had to 
use multiple separate status commands ("cs-status", "aio-status" 
and "cop-status") to get a good overview of what is happening. 
The intent is to now print all essential information with 
just one command, while more detailed information is still 
available through the separate commands.

5. Contributors to 2.5.x series
-------------------------------

Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes

v2.5.0:
   * Cyril Brulebois (1) [cyrilbrulebois]
       Compilation error with GCC-4.3. Reported as Debian
       bug #454890.
   * Fabian Groffen (1) [grobian]
       Fixed Mac OS X 10.5 build error.
   * Andrew Lees (1) [andrewl]
       Added 'reopen-count' parameter to '-ge'.

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

v2.5.0:
   * Julien Claassen (2)
       Traced down a severe error in the development builds related
       to parsing and handling JACK connection parameters. Bugs
       in the refactored EWF code.
   * Rocco (2)
       Bugs in the new 'audioloop' object. Bug in JACK server
       connection management.
   * Duphil (1)
       Bug in 'cs-save/cs-save-as'.
   * Jan Weil (1)
       Bug in 'cs-status' output.
   * Sergei Steshenko (1)
       Sloppy parsing of "loop" device arguments

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

v2.5.0:
   * Sergei Steshenko (1)
       Ability to use string tags as loop device identifiers

Participants of the Last Minute Test Release Effort

v2.5.0:
   * Brad Bowman
   * Julien Claassen
   * Dubphil
   * Rocco

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/ecasound-2.5.0.tar.gz
 	md5sum: abec6ab833d9322ba102fa563bc3e258

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

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