[ecasound] preparing for release: 2.4.7pre1_2.5.0

Hi,

I'm again trying to concentrate my efforts on getting 2.5.0 released.
Things are looking pretty good at this point, but as so much time has
passed since the last release, some extra last minute testing would not
hurt. So here's a link to a prerelease tarball:

http://ecasound.seul.org/download/snapshots/ecasound-2.4.7pre1_2.5.0.tar.gz

** Note for potential testers! **
Everyone who gives the prerelease(s) a test run and provides some kind of
feedback to the list, will be mentioned in a special "last minute
release test participants" section in the official release notes. :)

To be realistic, Ecasound is not the hottest project around in the open
source world ;), so getting people to test it is not easy. And this is
completely understandable, or should I even say preferable (I really do
hope that most of you are happy with whatever version of ecasound that
comes with your distribution of choice). I'm not sure if getting to the
release notes is enough of a incentive to get involved, but if I can get
one extra tester this way, I'm happy! :)

Btw, Ecasound is getting old (or about to hit the open-source teens,
which ever way you look at it) -- it's going to be 10 years since the
first public GPL release in June next year, wow!

But back to business. Comments are also welcome to below release
related texts.

Freshmeat compatible changes summary:
--cut--
A set of new input types, including a tone generator, audio
looper, selector and sequencer ("playat"), have been added.
Ecasound EWF file support has gone through a major refactoring.
The Ecasound Emacs mode has been updated with more ECI commands.
The usual set of bugs have been fixed.
--cut--

Current release notes section on new features:
--cut--
* Added a new audio looper object. For instance "-i:audioloop,foo.wav"
   will play "foo.wav" and loop it indefinitely. See http://eca.cx/examples
   and ecasound(1) man page for more information.

* Added a new audio selector object. Specifying
   "-i:select,5,15.2,foo.wav" will play out 15.2sec of
   "foo.wav", starting at position 5sec (i.e. selects range
   5.0-20.2sec). See http://eca.cx/examples and ecasound(1)
   man page for more information.

* Added a new sequencer object that allows to play audio
   clips at a given position. Specifying
   "-i:playat,25.0,foo.wav" will play out "foo.wav"
   starting at position 25.0sec (i.e. the first 25.0secs
   will be silent and then "foo.wav" is played from
   the beginning). See http://eca.cx/examples and ecasound(1)
   man page for more information.

* Code for Ecasound Wave Files (EWF) has been mostly rewritten
   to fix longstanding bugs and design issues. This release also
   marks the ability to write to EWF files as a deprecated feature
   that will be removed in a later release. One new feature is
   the ability to specify parameters in terms of samples instead
   of seconds.

* Added a simple tone generator object. For example '-i:tone,sine,440,10.3'
   will produce a 440Hz sine tone with duration of 10.3 seconds. This input
   type will be especially useful for reproducing bugs in complicated
   chainsetups, without the need to exchange complete session data (which
   usually are composed of large amounts of audio files).

* Major update to the "Ecasound Examples": http://eca.cx/examples

* Updates to ecasound.el (ecasound emacs mode): new ECI commands
   exported.

* Various bugs (in runtime functionality, documentation as well as
   build issues) have been fixed.
--cut--

Current NEWS contents for 2.5.0:
--cut--
xx072008 (v2.5.0) -** stable release **-
         - notice: slightly modified the version numbering scheme -
                   minor version is incremented whenever non-trivial
                   new features are added
         - notice: verified to compile with minimal warnings with
                   gcc-4.3.1
         - edi-entries: edi-40 closed (Update to error and warning
                        reporting mechanisms)
         - added: ecasound.el: added missing ECI commands cs-option,
                  cs-set-length, cs-set-position-samples, ai-get-length,
                  ai-set-position, and ai-set-position-samples [dto,
                  mlang]
         - added: tone generator input; '-i:tone,sine,440,10.3' will
                  create a 440Hz sine tone with duration of 10.3 seconds;
                  this input type will be especially useful for reproducing
                  bugs in complicated chainsetups, without the need to
                  exchange complete session data (which usually are composed
                  of large amounts of audio data)
         - added: audio looper object; "-i:audioloop,foo.wav" will play
                  'foo.wav' and loop it indefinitely
         - added: audio selector object; "-i:select,5,15.2,foo.wav" will
                  play 15.2sec of "foo.wav", starting at position 5sec.
         - added: audio play-at object; "-i:playat,5,foo.wav" will
                  start playing "foo.wav" after position reaches 5sec
         - added: EWF files; ability to specify positions in time in
                  sample frames; "2.0" is interpreted as 2.0secs while
                  "88200sa" is interpreted as 88200 samples
         - changed: most of the EWF support (Ecasound Wave Files, .ewf)
                    has been rewritten in this version; numerous bugs
                    are fixed
         - changed: eaim - commands 'cop-add' and 'ctrl-add' now allow
                    an alternate syntax: both "-<id_string>:par1,...,parN"
                    and "<id_string>:par1,...,parN" are now accepted
         - changed: ability to write to EWF file is now marked as
                    a deprecated feature which will be removed in
                    a later release
         - changed: mechanism to terminate forked child processes;
                    properly wait for process termination in all
                    circumstances (previously there were some
                    unhandled corner cases)
         - changed: major updates to the examples.html page (available
                    also at http://eca.cx/examples )
         - changed: refactored logic for propagating seek events
                    across chainsetups; warnings are now issued if
                    one tries to seek objects that do not supports
                    seeking; similarly warning is issued if a given
                    audio object type doesn't support sample accurate
                    seeks (for example mp3 inputs have this limitation)
         - changed: updated ecasound(1) man page description of '-klg'
         - fixed: incorrect usage of the Python C API, which leads to
                  segfaults when pyecasound is used under python2.5;
                  fixes Debian bug #468965
         - fixed: bugs in ewf-looping code
         - fixed: avoid terminating processing when invalid parameters are
                  passed to channel copy (chcopy/erc), mix (chmix/erm) and
                  move (chmove) chainops
         - fixed: eaim - buffering mode was sometimes incorrectly
                  reported in 'cs-status' output (-B:auto instead of
                  the actual set buffering mode) output; bug reported by
                  Jan Weil
         - fixed: compilation warnings from GCC-4.3; fixes Debian bug
                  #454890, patch from Cyril Brulebois
         - fixed: bug in passing multiple arguments to 'typeselect',
                  'resample', and 'resample' objects
         - fixed: with some glibc versions (tested with 2.3.6.ds1-13etch5),
                  ecasound did not fully clean up all threads when
                  it received a signal and terminated; the bug showed
                  up as a stuck thread, with backtrace pointing to
                  pthread_onexit_process()
         - fixed: compilation issue on Mac OS X 10.5 [grobian]
--cut--

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