1. A short summary of changes
A set of severe bugs in audio mixing code have been fixed.
Pyecasound build process has been improved. Reporting chainsetup
parsing errors has been improved significantly. Support for
the JACK 0.80 transport interface has been added. Support for
reading and writing aiff, snd and au files has been fixed.
Changes have been made to ensure correct operation with
the NPTL package recently added to Linux kernel and glibc.
A serious bug in metronome timing was fixed. Minor bugs
in dynamic sample rate changes, MIDI-server initialization
and the ewf file format have been fixed.
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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 licensed under the LGPL.
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3. Changes since last release
* Support for JACK 0.80 transport interface. The recently
released JACK 0.80.0 marks another milestone for Linux audio
development. The new transport interface allows concurrent use
of multiple independent audio applications with full
sample-accurate transport synchronization. This release of
Ecasound provides full support for the new transport API.
See the following links to ecasound-list postings that
give examples of how to use Ecasound with the new transport API:
http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2003/08/0005.html
http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2003/08/0070.html
* Metronome timing bug. There was a subtle bug in the
pulse gate operator that is used to generate the
metronome signal. This bug caused a small (<0.5%) timing
error in metronome speed. The bug has been fixed, but the
change in speed might cause problems for working with
sessions recorded with previous versions of Ecasound.
Thanks to Carsten Bauer for finding the bug.
Full list of changes is available at
<http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>.
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4. Interface and configuration file changes
Libecasound interface version number was incremented to 11.
This release is backwards compatible with interface
versions 9 and 10. See 'ecasound/libecasound/ChangeLog'
for a detailed list of changes.
Libkvutils interface version number was incremented to 6.
This release is backwards compatible with versions 5 and 4.
See 'ecasound/kvutils/ChangeLog' for a detailed list of changes.
Note! Using libecasound and libkvutils outside Ecasound has
been discouraged since the release of 2.2.0 in Jan 2003. The
interface changes introduced in this 2.3.0 release should
only affect a small group of distributors and developers.
Apps such as Ecamegapedal need to be recompiled only if
you want to take advantage of the new features introduced
in the latest Ecasound release.
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5. Contributors
Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes
Kai Vehmanen (various)
Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed)
Jeremy Hall (3) -- non-default chainsetup srates, mixdown
signal leak bug, pyecasound install
Junichi Uekawa (3) -- non-default chainsetup srates,
pyecasound install, gcc-3.3 verification
Janne Halttunen (2) -- locale-settings broke map-* commands,
MIDI-server startup bug
Vegard Lima (2) -- feedback bug, ewf srate bug
Carsten Bauer (1) -- timing bug in metronome and pulse gate
Ismail Donmez (1) -- build errors with sys-readline option
Lars Henrik Mai (1) -- aiff/au/snd bug
Stephan Niemz (1) -- non-default chainsetup srates
Al Oemens (1) -- reporting chainsetup parsing errors
Oliver Thuns (1) -- -ei big shift-x values
Tommi Uimonen (1) -- problems with ecasignalview channel meter
layout
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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-2.3.0.tar.gz
Distributions with maintained Ecasound support:
Agnula - http://www.agnula.org
Debian - 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/software
SuSE Linux - http://www.suse.de/en
Contrib Packages for Distributions:
Mandrake - http://rpm.nyvalls.se/
Slackware - http://www.audioslack.com
Various distros - http://apps.kde.com/rf/2/info/id/2146
Note! Distributors do not necessarily provide packages for
the very latest Ecasound version.
--
http://www.eca.cx
Audio software for Linux!
