1. A short summary of changes Support for JACK and LADSPA 1.1 added, more intelligent runtime parameter selection, ECI licence changed from GPL to LGPL, new NetECI client API, ecasound emacs mode added, largefile support, new resample, reverse and typeselect audio objects, new peak amplitude chain operator and new utilities ecalength, ecamonitor and ecasignalview. --- 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 licenced under the LGPL. --- 3. Changes since last release Although over a year has passed since the last major stable release, ecasound development work has not stopped. To put things into perspective, a diff between 2.0.0 and 2.2.0 takes about 1.7MB of space. Considering the whole 2.2 codebase is just over 2MB, this is quite a lot! In the future there will hopefully be much more frequent releases. Here's a list of most notable changes: * Intelligent parameter configuration. Instead of one set of default parameters, ecasound lets user specify different parameters for three predefined profiles: real-time, real-time-low-latency and non-real-time. When starting processing, ecasound will automatically select and use most suitable profile for the given configuration. Ecasound will not only consider the types of objects, but also the runtime environment: whether it is possible to lock memory, to use RT-scheduling and so on. * The Ecasound Control Interface is now licensed under LGPL. In addition, the ECI implementations are now standalone, and do not require linking against libecasound and libkvutils. Only thing needed to run ECI apps is to have a working ecasound executable installed. * JACK support added. This is a major new addition as it involved making relatively large changes to the ecasound engine. * Up-to-date support for ALSA-0.9 and LADSPA-1.1. * Effect preset improvements. Support for parametrized presets has been improved. For instance it's now possible to write a wrapper effect preset for a complex ecasound effect or LADSPA plugin, and only publish a subset of original effect's parameters. * The disk i/o buffering subsystem that was introduced in ecasound 2.0 has been integrated more closely to the ecasound engine leading to better performance and reliability. * NetECI API. Ecasound now has a daemon mode that allows multiple clients, using the NetECI protocol, to connect to a running ecasound session. A proof-of-concept client, ecamonitor, is included in the package. It can be used to monitor ecasound session status from a separate console. This is especially useful in combination with ecasound's console mode user interface. The console interface can be used for control and the NetECI monitor client for getting real-time status information. In addition, NetECI can be used with all ECI apps. * Ecasound.el, an emacs ecasound mode and a Lisp ECI implementation. * Largefile support for reading and writing audio files larger than 2GB. * New audio object types: JACK, resample, reverse, typeselect. * New chain operators: peak amplitude monitor * Utilities: ecalength and ecamonitor added, ecasignalview totally rewritten. * New ECI implementations: Lisp, Perl and PHP (the last two are not included in the main ecasound package) Full list of changes is available at <http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>. --- 4. Interface and configuration file changes * Command line options: 2.2 is backward compatible with 2.0 releases, so old scripts and .ecs files should continue to work. See ecasound(1) for more info. * Ecasound Interactive Mode (EIAM): No changes to the commands available in 2.0 releases. See ecasound-iam(1) for more info. * Library interfaces: Major changes in all library interfaces. Direct use of these libraries is no longer encouraged. The ECI and NetECI APIs are preferred for developing new applications on top of ecasound. * Ecasound Control Interface (ECI): No interface changes. * The ~/.ecasoundrc config file is no longer used. The new location is ~/.ecasound/ecasoundrc. As there's now a separate global configuration file, it is no longer necessary to duplicate all config variables in the user config files. See ecasoundrc(5) for further info. --- 5. Links and files Web sites: http://www.eca.cx http://www.eca.cx/ecasound - http://www.alsa-project.org http://jackit.sourceforge.net http://www.ladspa.org Source and binary packages: http://ecasound.seul.org/download http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.2.0.tar.gz Distributions with maintained ecasound support: Agnula - http://www.agnula.org Debian - http://packages.debian.org/stable/sound/ecasound.html 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 SuSE Linux - http://www.suse.de/en Note! Distributors do not necessarily provide packages for the latest ecasound version. -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!