subject: Ecasound 2.5.2 released version: 20080824-2 1. Summary of changes --------------------- Bug in channel routing of LADSPA plugins that have more audio output ports than input ports has been fixed. 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 in 2.5.x series -------------------------- v2.5.2: * Bug fixes only. v2.5.1: * Reverted some of the changes in 2.5.0 related to handling of session cleanup after receiving a SIGTERM/INT/HUP signal. While not reproducible on all systems, some users reported that quitting ecasound with a ctrl-C caused the whole X session to terminate. This bug is now fixed in 2.5.1. v2.5.0: * 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. * Ability to stack audio objects. For instance "-i audioloop,reverse,select,10,15,foo.wav" will loop a reversed 15sec segment taken from 10sec onwards from 'file.wav'. * 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). * Added 'reopen-count' parameter to threshold gate (-ge) operator. For instance when recording vinyl/tapes, this allows to automatically restart recording when a new track is started. When the gate is closed, no audio is passed through to the output file, but otherwise recording is kept running. Patch from Andrew Lees. * 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. Full list of changes is available at: - http://www.eca.cx/ecasound/history.php 4. Interface and configuration file changes ------------------------------------------- None in this release. 5. Contributors to 2.5.x series ------------------------------- Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes v2.5.0: * Cyril Brulebois (1) [cyrilbrulebois] Compilation error with GCC-4.3. Reported as Debian bug #454890. * Fabian Groffen (1) [grobian] Fixed Mac OS X 10.5 build error. * Andrew Lees (1) [andrewl] Added 'reopen-count' parameter to '-ge'. Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed) v2.5.2: * Sergei Steshenko (1) Bug in LADSPA plugin channel routing. v2.5.1: * Sergei Steshenko (2) Bug in registering LADSPA plugins. The "X crash bug". * Alexis Ballier (1) A last minute change in 2.5.0 that causes build errors with gcc-4.3.1. * Oliver Oli, Dubphil (1) The "X crash bug". v2.5.0: * Julien Claassen (2) Traced down a severe error in the development builds related to parsing and handling JACK connection parameters. Bugs in the refactored EWF code. * Rocco (2) Bugs in the new 'audioloop' object. Bug in JACK server connection management. * Duphil (1) Bug in 'cs-save/cs-save-as'. * Jan Weil (1) Bug in 'cs-status' output. * Sergei Steshenko (1) Sloppy parsing of "loop" device arguments Feature suggestions - Ideas that led to new features (items) v2.5.0: * Sergei Steshenko (1) Ability to use string tags as loop device identifiers 6. Links and files ------------------ Web site (and mirrors): http://eca.cx (fi) http://ecasound.seul.org (us) http://ecasound.sourceforge.net (us) Source packages: http://ecasound.seul.org/download http://ecasound.seul.org/download/ecasound-2.5.2.tar.gz md5sum: c7d26db96a7ea5749df9d5137d3c397d List of distributions with maintained Ecasound support: See http://eca.cx/ecasound/download.php --