[LAA] [ANN] Ecasound 2.5.0 released

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 --