Hello all, Ecasound 2.4.5 has been released! Releases notes follow: 1. Summary of changes --------------------- Native support for FLAC files has been added using the sndfile library. New debugging tools for ecasound scripting and ECI applicatin development have been added. Bugs related to ecasound process return values, memory corruption in ECI apps, handling of 24/32bit big-endian audio files, robustness of mp3/ogg/flac/aac support, managing loop devices, parsing user input, and build errors on cygwin, have been fixed. A set of new processing ops for channel routing and mixing has been added. 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 ----------------------------- * Full read/write support for flac files with support for seeking. Requires libsndfile 1.0.12 or newer. * Some bugs in setting the ecasound return value have been fixed. Ecasound now properly signals errors like insufficient write permissions, or running out of storage space during processing, via non-zero return values. The possible return values are now also documented in ecasound(1). * A new debugging mechanism controlled by ECASOUND_LOGFILE and ECASOUND_LOGLEVEL environment variables. This is meant especially for debugging ECI applications, and scripted uses of ecasound. You can test this for instance by issuing: sh> ECASOUND_LOGLEVEL=ecalog.txt ecaplay *.wav And look at 'ecalog.txt' afterwards. This mechanism for ECI debugging really should have been there from the start. See ecasound(1) for more details. * A set of new audio operators have been added for channel routing/mixing: -chcopy (alias for -erc), -chmove, -chmute and -chmix (alias for -erm). See the full documentation in ecasound(1). * The in-tree sources for readline-4.0 have been removed from the package. Originally, some time around 1999, readline was included to the package due to numerous problems with Linux distros of the time that came with old versions of readline. This however no longer is the case. Nowadays, pretty much all non-ancient systems have at least readline-4.0, and most have already readline-5.0. Ancient machines are however still supported. To this end, ecasound now provides an option to compile with readline disabled. * Various bugfixes including: severe memory handling error in ECI C implementation, bugs in processing 24/32bit big-endian audio files, problems with interactive mode commands operating on controllers, handling loop devices when saving chainsetup state, batch processing of setups with mp3/ogg/flac/aac outputs, build errors on cygwin, ... * Sourceforge.net bug items affected: #1415814, #1531042, #1456510 Full list of changes is available at: - http://www.eca.cx/ecasound/history.php 4. Interface and configuration file changes ------------------------------------------- None in this release. 5. Contributors to this release ------------------------------- Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes * Stuart Allie (2) Segfaults in processing 'ctrlp-*' commands. Problem in saving chainsetups with loop devices. * Pedro Antonio Fructuoso Merino (2) Patch to fix segfault when parsing escaped user input. Patch to fix audible glitches from loop devices when seeking. * Aaron Heller (1) Patch to fix bugs in big-endian support. * Chris Head (1) Patch to ecasignalview build errors on cygwin. Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed) * Zrajm Akfohg (1) Bug in ecasound process return values. * Florian Ladstaedter (1) Invalid headers in created flac files. * Pedro Antonio Fructuoso Merino (1) Seg.fault when removing loop devices. * Koen (kbr at patat dot .org) (1) Segfault when parsing escaped user input. * Kurt Konolige (1) Bug with 'rw 0'. * Brad Bowman, Stuart Allie, Joel Roth (1) Severe memory handling bug in libecasoundc (ECI C API) 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 http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.4.5.tar.gz md5sum: b5a4f39245e505941f26c5c2c3b80e1c List of distributions with maintained Ecasound support: See http://eca.cx/ecasound/download.php -- links, my public keys, etc at http://eca.cx/kv