Hello all, this year's first stable Ecasound release is now out! Most of the final tuning for this release was done last Sunday while watching and listening to the last sessions of 'laconf2'. Many thanks to all the organizers and participants! And special thanks for the excellant net coverage of the event! But now, back to the 2.3.3 release -- here are the details: 1. Summary of changes Bugs in ecasignalview, effect presets, NetECI protocol parser and the C ECI implementation have been fixed. Many build system issues, including errors in building against libsndfile-1.0.4 and older, have been resolved. A separate section covering ecasound.el, the ecasound emacs interface, has been added to the Ecasound Control Interface Guide. The Ecasound User's Guide has also been updated. --- 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. --- 3. Changes since last release * Preset handling fixes: When saving chainsetups containing presets, values of preset parameters were not saved correctly. Also problems with presets containing untitled parameters have been fixed. * New ecasoundrc(5) setting "autodetect" for "default-output" has been added. When selected, libecasound will check for JACK support and whether a JACK server is running, if not found, check for ALSA, then OSS, and finally fallback to using "rtnull". This feature is especially useful to apps such as ecaplay. * Fixes to ecasignalview: Proper cleanup after receiving an interrupt from keyboard (SIGINT/CTRL-C) has been added. Originally tested on FreeBSD, but helps on Linux as well. * Ecasound Interactive Mode (EIAM) updates: Added new command 'map-ladspa-id-list' to allow listing the available plugins by their unique ID numbers. A special case value of '-1' is now understood by 'cs-set-length'. This allows undoing any previously set length value. * Ecasound Control Interface (ECI) updates: Added a section on ecasound.el - the Ecasound emacs interface - to the ECI Guide [1]. Several bugs have been fixed in the ECI C implementation. A serious bug in NetECI protocol parser, that caused parsing long (over 32 chars) commands to fail, has also been fixed. * Documentation updates: The Ecasound User's Guide [2] has been updated. Also, a bug in the groff source for the ecasound(1) man page that prevented man from showing the last five pages of the document, has been fixed. * Build system fixes: Problems in building against libsndfile-1.0.4 and older have been fixed. 'libecasound-config --libs' has been fixed to return the full list of external libraries. Based on recent discussions on linux-audio-dev, minor changes have been made to processing CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Full list of changes is available at <http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/history.html>. --- 4. Interface and configuration file changes * ecasoundrc(5) - "default-output": new value "autodetect" (default) --- 5. Contributors Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes Michael Ewe (2) -- bugfixes to ecasignalview and ECI C impl Mario Lang (1) -- section on ecasound.el to ECI Guide Eric Rzewnicki (1) -- set of updates to Ecasound User's Guide Kai Vehmanen (n/a) -- various Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed) Pierre Lorenzon (1) -- bugs in ecasound's daemon-mode protocol parser Jan Weil (1) -- cs-save dit not save preset parameters Feature suggestions - Ideas that led to new features (items) Jan Weil (2) -- map-ladspa-id-list command, -t:1 option --- 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-2.3.3.tar.gz Referenced documents: [1] - http://www.eca.cx/eci-guide [2] - http://www.eca.cx/eca-u-guide Distributions with maintained Ecasound support: Agnula - http://www.agnula.org AltLinux - http://www.altlinux.com Debian - http://www.debian.org FreeBSD - http://www.freebsd.org/ports/audio.html Gentoo Linux - http://www.gentoo.org Mandrake - http://www.mandrake.org PLD Linux - http://www.pld.org.pl SuSE Linux - http://www.suse.de/en Contrib Packages and Add-On Distributions: AudioSlack for Slackware - http://www.audioslack.com PlanetCCRMA for RedHat/Fedora - http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software Thac's RPMs for Mandrake - http://rpm.nyvalls.se Note! Distributors do not necessarily provide packages for the very latest Ecasound version. --- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!
