Hello everybody, it's again time for a new Ecasound release. Full details follow: --- 1. Summary of changes Serious bugs in multitrack sync code, ECI C implementation and big-endian platform support have been fixed. Support has been added for input and output of FLAC, AAC and M4A files. Improvements have been made to both FreeBSD and Mac OS X support. Many minor improvements to ECI implementations and user documentation. --- 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 * FLAC support added. The 'flac' tools is used for both encoding and decoding. * AAC/M4A/MP4 support added. The 'faad' and 'faac' tools are used for encoding and decoding. * Improved support for both FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Ecasound should now compile out-of-the-box on recent releases of these systems. * A critical bug was fixed in multitrack-offset calculation code. This bug was triggered by ALSA devices that limit playback period count to two (for example rme9652 and cs4281). * Minor fixes to both mp3 and ogg input support. * Many improvements to the C ECI implementation: Bug which caused losses of sync between clients and the engine was fixed. Float return values are now returned with higher precision. These improvements affect all ECI implementations that are based on libecasoundc (Perl, Python, PHP interfaces). Full list of changes is available at <http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>. --- 4. Interface and configuration file changes None. --- 5. Contributors Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes Jesse Chappell (5) -- Bugfix to sync-loss problem in C ECI impl, improvements to libsndfile support and other bugfixes. Sean Bolton (1) -- MacOS X compability patch Adam Linson (1) -- ecasound-iam(1) update Kai Vehmanen () -- various Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed) Eric Dantan Rzewnicki (2) -- bugs in FLAC support, manpage errors Jesse Chappell (1) -- Bugs in C ECI impl. Winkler Paul (1) -- error in engine state after 'run' Feature suggestions - Ideas that led to new features (items) Didier Bellamy -- AAC input/output support --- 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-2.3.4.tar.gz md5sum: 4d8e319b6c231acfe4884cc24114cace Distributions with maintained Ecasound support: See http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/download.html -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!