[linux-audio-dev] [ANN] ecasound 2.2.0 released

Kai Vehmanen kai.vehmanen at wakkanet.fi
Thu Jan 9 20:32:38 UTC 2003


1. A short summary of changes

Support for JACK and LADSPA 1.1 added, more intelligent runtime
parameter selection, ECI licence changed from GPL to LGPL, 
new NetECI client API, ecasound emacs mode added, largefile 
support, new resample, reverse and typeselect audio objects, 
new peak amplitude chain operator and new utilities ecalength, 
ecamonitor and ecasignalview.

---
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 licenced under the LGPL.

---
3. Changes since last release

Although over a year has passed since the last major stable 
release, ecasound development work has not stopped. To put things
into perspective, a diff between 2.0.0 and 2.2.0 takes about 
1.7MB of space. Considering the whole 2.2 codebase is just 
over 2MB, this is quite a lot! In the future there will hopefully 
be much more frequent releases. Here's a list of most notable 
changes:

* Intelligent parameter configuration. Instead of one set of 
  default parameters, ecasound lets user specify different parameters
  for three predefined profiles: real-time, real-time-low-latency and 
  non-real-time. When starting processing, ecasound will automatically 
  select and use most suitable profile for the given configuration. 
  Ecasound will not only consider the types of objects, but also the 
  runtime environment: whether it is possible to lock memory, to use 
  RT-scheduling and so on.

* The Ecasound Control Interface is now licensed under LGPL.
  In addition, the ECI implementations are now standalone, and do
  not require linking against libecasound and libkvutils. Only
  thing needed to run ECI apps is to have a working ecasound 
  executable installed.

* JACK support added. This is a major new addition as it involved
  making relatively large changes to the ecasound engine.

* Up-to-date support for ALSA-0.9 and LADSPA-1.1.

* Effect preset improvements. Support for parametrized presets
  has been improved. For instance it's now possible to write  
  a wrapper effect preset for a complex ecasound effect
  or LADSPA plugin, and only publish a subset of original 
  effect's parameters.

* The disk i/o buffering subsystem that was introduced
  in ecasound 2.0 has been integrated more closely to 
  the ecasound engine leading to better performance and
  reliability.

* NetECI API. Ecasound now has a daemon mode that allows 
  multiple clients, using the NetECI protocol, to connect to 
  a running ecasound session. A proof-of-concept client,
  ecamonitor, is included in the package. It can be used
  to monitor ecasound session status from a separate console.
  This is especially useful in combination with ecasound's
  console mode user interface. The console interface can
  be used for control and the NetECI monitor client for
  getting real-time status information. In addition, 
  NetECI can be used with all ECI apps.

* Ecasound.el, an emacs ecasound mode and a Lisp ECI 
  implementation.

* Largefile support for reading and writing audio files larger
  than 2GB.

* New audio object types: JACK, resample, reverse, typeselect.

* New chain operators: peak amplitude monitor

* Utilities: ecalength and ecamonitor added, ecasignalview 
             totally rewritten.

* New ECI implementations: Lisp, Perl and PHP (the last two
  are not included in the main ecasound package)

Full list of changes is available at 
<http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>.

---
4. Interface and configuration file changes

* Command line options: 2.2 is backward compatible with 
  2.0 releases, so old scripts and .ecs files should
  continue to work. See ecasound(1) for more info.

* Ecasound Interactive Mode (EIAM): No changes to the commands 
  available in 2.0 releases. See ecasound-iam(1) for more
  info.

* Library interfaces: Major changes in all library interfaces.
  Direct use of these libraries is no longer encouraged.
  The ECI and NetECI APIs are preferred for developing new
  applications on top of ecasound.

* Ecasound Control Interface (ECI): No interface changes.

* The ~/.ecasoundrc config file is no longer used. The
  new location is ~/.ecasound/ecasoundrc. As there's now
  a separate global configuration file, it is no longer
  necessary to duplicate all config variables in the 
  user config files. See ecasoundrc(5) for further info.

---
5. Links and files
   
Web sites:
	http://www.eca.cx
	http://www.eca.cx/ecasound
	-
	http://www.alsa-project.org
	http://jackit.sourceforge.net
	http://www.ladspa.org

Source and binary packages:
	http://ecasound.seul.org/download
	http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.2.0.tar.gz

Distributions with maintained ecasound support:
	Agnula - http://www.agnula.org
	Debian - http://packages.debian.org/stable/sound/ecasound.html
	 	 http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/ecasound2.2.html
	DeMuDi - http://www.demudi.org
	FreeBSD - http://www.freebsd.org/ports/audio.html
	Gentoo Linux - http://www.gentoo.org
	PLD Linux - http://www.pld.org.pl
	PlanetCCRMA - http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma
	SuSE Linux -  http://www.suse.de/en

Note! Distributors do not necessarily provide packages for 
      the latest ecasound version.

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




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