Hi Everyone, This mail announces the 1.062 release of Nama, an Ecasound-based multitrack recorder, mixer and mastering tool. New features, several code refactorings and uncounted bug fixes make this version the best evar. There is also a website.[1] The Debian package, newly available through the Debian 'unstable' repository, should work on 'stable' and 'testing' distributions as well. Nama is also available from CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. -- Basics -- Nama adds a text-based user interface and DAW-like concepts to the Ecasound audio processing engine. Nama benefits from Ecasound's reliability, maturity and flexibility, while saving the user from Ecasound's learning curve. Although Nama has its own learning curve, it is designed to make easy things easy, and some hard things easy, too. Since it does not depend on X, Nama is suitable for console users, headless systems, and low-power CPUs. It could also be used for comparative recording tests in situations where video card interrupt conflicts are suspected. -- Some details -- Nama works seamlessly with ALSA and JACK. LADSPA plugins are automatically detected, and may be found through Nama's help system by name or keyword. Nama has an optional, ugly-duckling GUI that can handle basic recording, mixing and fx-processing. I'd like to acknowledge Julien Claassen for his thorough testing, numerous suggestions and overall encouragement. He's recently used Nama to produce some excellent compositions.[2] -- Features List -- + Pre- and post-fader send buses These are mainly for instrument monitor use, allowing each musician to have her own custom mix. A send bus duplicates all user track signals. Each musician can adjust volume/pan/effects set to suit. + Sub buses Useful for mixing groups of signals before they arrive at the mixer provided by the Main bus + Post-fader inserts with wet/dry control Track signals can be routed signals through external JACK clients such as jconverter, or through the soundcard to analog effects. + Track freezing Like mixdown on a per-track basis, it can be helpful in setups with many effects and limited CPU resources. The 'cache' command records a new version of the current track with all effects applied. The 'uncache' command sets the previous version with the original effects. + Effect chains Nama's version of presets. An effect chain can be any or all track effects with current parameter values. + Effect profiles A group of effect chains for multiple tracks can be stored under one name. For example, "new_effect_profile Mastering jpop" stores effect chains for all tracks in the Mastering group as "jpop". + Track effects bypass/restore + Graph-based routing system Nama now has a more capable graph-based routing system that replaces the original rule-based system. Nodes of the graph are used to represent tracks, signal sources and signal sinks. Edges indicate signal paths. Nama adds loop devices to the graph as needed, a significant convenience compared to hand-configured Ecasound. The new routing system should also make it straightforward to build in latency compensation. + Two interfaces to Ecasound Nama will use libecasoundc via Brad Bowman's Audio::Ecasound module if it is available. Otherwise, Nama will run Ecasound in server mode and communicate via the Net-ECI interface. This has no effect on the user interface. -- Bugs and Limitations Nama does *not* have a graphic waveform display. Fortunately you have many alternatives to choose from if you need this capability. All file IO in Nama uses the WAV file format. I just discovered that when Nama is installed from Debian, interrupting the program requires a Ctrl-C *plus some additional keystroke* to exit. -- Installation -- + For Debian 'unstable' systems apt-get install nama (Something similar is possible for other Debian distributions.) + From CPAN cpan Audio::Nama cpan Tk # to use the GUI + Browse or build from github[3] + Browse at CPAN[4] Regards, Joel [1] http://freeshell.de/~bolangi/nama [2] http://juliencoder.de/nama/ [3] http://github.com/bolangi/nama [4] http://search.cpan.org/dist/Audio-Nama/ -- Joel Roth