[linux-audio-announce] ecasound 2.3.0 released

1. A short summary of changes A set of severe bugs in audio mixing code have been fixed. Pyecasound build process has been improved. Reporting chainsetup parsing errors has been improved significantly. Support for the JACK 0.80 transport interface has been added. Support for reading and writing aiff, snd and au files has been fixed. Changes have been made to ensure correct operation with the NPTL package recently added to Linux kernel and glibc. A serious bug in metronome timing was fixed. Minor bugs in dynamic sample rate changes, MIDI-server initialization and the ewf file format 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. Ecasound is licensed under the GPL. The Ecasound Control Interface (ECI) is licensed under the LGPL. --- 3. Changes since last release * Support for JACK 0.80 transport interface. The recently released JACK 0.80.0 marks another milestone for Linux audio development. The new transport interface allows concurrent use of multiple independent audio applications with full sample-accurate transport synchronization. This release of Ecasound provides full support for the new transport API. See the following links to ecasound-list postings that give examples of how to use Ecasound with the new transport API: http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2003/08/0005.html http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2003/08/0070.html * Metronome timing bug. There was a subtle bug in the pulse gate operator that is used to generate the metronome signal. This bug caused a small (<0.5%) timing error in metronome speed. The bug has been fixed, but the change in speed might cause problems for working with sessions recorded with previous versions of Ecasound. Thanks to Carsten Bauer for finding the bug. Full list of changes is available at <http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>. --- 4. Interface and configuration file changes Libecasound interface version number was incremented to 11. This release is backwards compatible with interface versions 9 and 10. See 'ecasound/libecasound/ChangeLog' for a detailed list of changes. Libkvutils interface version number was incremented to 6. This release is backwards compatible with versions 5 and 4. See 'ecasound/kvutils/ChangeLog' for a detailed list of changes. Note! Using libecasound and libkvutils outside Ecasound has been discouraged since the release of 2.2.0 in Jan 2003. The interface changes introduced in this 2.3.0 release should only affect a small group of distributors and developers. Apps such as Ecamegapedal need to be recompiled only if you want to take advantage of the new features introduced in the latest Ecasound release. --- 5. Contributors Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes Kai Vehmanen (various) Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed) Jeremy Hall (3) -- non-default chainsetup srates, mixdown signal leak bug, pyecasound install Junichi Uekawa (3) -- non-default chainsetup srates, pyecasound install, gcc-3.3 verification Janne Halttunen (2) -- locale-settings broke map-* commands, MIDI-server startup bug Vegard Lima (2) -- feedback bug, ewf srate bug Carsten Bauer (1) -- timing bug in metronome and pulse gate Ismail Donmez (1) -- build errors with sys-readline option Lars Henrik Mai (1) -- aiff/au/snd bug Stephan Niemz (1) -- non-default chainsetup srates Al Oemens (1) -- reporting chainsetup parsing errors Oliver Thuns (1) -- -ei big shift-x values Tommi Uimonen (1) -- problems with ecasignalview channel meter layout --- 6. Links and files Web sites: http://www.eca.cx http://www.eca.cx/ecasound Source packages: http://ecasound.seul.org/download http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.3.0.tar.gz Distributions with maintained Ecasound support: Agnula - http://www.agnula.org Debian - 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/software SuSE Linux - http://www.suse.de/en Contrib Packages for Distributions: Mandrake - http://rpm.nyvalls.se/ Slackware - http://www.audioslack.com Various distros - http://apps.kde.com/rf/2/info/id/2146 Note! Distributors do not necessarily provide packages for the very latest Ecasound version. -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!