[linux-audio-announce] [ANN] Ecasound 2.4.0 released

1. Summary of changes An annoying bug with handling filenames with whitespace has been fixed. Integration with libsamplerate and other resamplers has received a lot of attention and many bugs have been fixed. Error reporting has been improved when loading invalid chainsetups. A new sum-mixdown mode has been added to the engine. Some minor cosmetic changes have been made to the output produced by the console ecasound interface. A log message history mechanism has been added to the engine to help ECI app and script development. --- 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 * Fixed a bug present in 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 releases which broke handling spaces in filenames. This affected all file formats handled via external tools (ogg/mp3/flac/m4a/...). * Improved support for handling commas in parameters such as filenames given to ECI commands and to the console ecasound interface. A section on "Filenames with commas not handled correctly" was added to the Ecasound User's Guide that provides more information about how commas and other special characters are handled by ecasound. * Log message history added. The EIAM command 'int-log-history' shows you the recent log messages printed via Ecasound subsystem, and 'int-set-log-history-length' sets the history buffer size. This should be a very useful tool for debugging ECI scripts and apps (insert int-log-history at suitable places in your code to get a detailed log of what happened in the engine). * Cosmetic changes to ecasound output. In the interactive mode (does not affect wellformed output or -D), ecasound now wraps all lines so that they fit into 74 columns. I've copied the "... " prefix style from the python interpreter to print messages that do not fit on one line. * Code added to analyze problems with chainsetups. If you now make common errors like: ecasound -i foo.wav -i foo.bar -o rtnull or ecasound -a:1 -i foo.wav -a:2 -i bar.wav -o rtnull ... ecasound will try to explain what is wrong with the configuration. This is related to edi-40, "Update to error and warning reporting mechanisms", development item. * Integration with libsamplerate and other resamplers has received a lot of attention and many bugs have been fixed. Special thanks to Aaron Heller, Kamil Wencel and Julien Claassen for the extensive testing! * Fixed segfaults related to buffersize and samplerate change events from JACK. Ecasound now gracefully shuts down if one of these events is received. Note that Ecasound is still not able to adapt to a new buffersize or samplerate on the fly. * A new 'sum' mixing mode has been introduced. Traditionally Ecasound has used the averaging method of mixing multiple input channels into one output channel. This avoids the risk of clipping, but can lead to suprising results in certain use-cases. The 'sum' method is closer to the way an analog mixer works. To retain backwards compability, the 'avg' mixing mode is still used as the default. Full list of changes is available at: - http://www.eca.cx/ecasound/history.php --- 4. Interface and configuration file changes * In string lists returned by ECI commands, all commas are now escaped with backslashes. This change was needed to make unambiguous parsing of the return values possible. * Ecasound console output is pretty-printed to fit 74 columns. This does not affect output in well-formed (-d:256) and plain-text (-D) modes. --- 5. Contributors to this release Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes * Vitaly Belostotsky and Junichi Uekawa (1): Bugs in compressor presets defined in effect_presets * Steve Harris and Tim Blechmann (1): Float anti-denormal routines from swh-plugins * Eric Dantan Rzewnicki (1): Manpage fixes Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed) * Jan Weil (3): Comma-escaping problems with EIAM return values * Aaron Heller, Kamil Wencel and Julien Claassen (1): Bugs in resampling with libsamplerate. * Didier Bellamy (1): Bug in aac/m4a encoding * Erik de Castro Lopo (1): Bug in resampling with libsamplerate * Jesse Chappell (1): Bug in resampling with libsamplerate * Frederik Eaton (1): Whitespace handling bugs ogg/mp3/ext support * Mario Lang (1): Regex metachars in LADSPA plugin description fields were not properly escaped * Philippe Schelté aka Dubphil (1): Denormal problems in Ecasound filters. * Junichi Uekawa (1): Whitespace handling bugs ogg/mp3/ext support. --- 6. Links and files Web site (and mirrors): http://www.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-2.4.0.tar.gz md5sum: 31693eb47ddb8b6f1ff8616c86265afe List of distributions with maintained Ecasound support: See http://www.eca.cx/download.php -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!