[linux-audio-announce] [ANN] Ecasound 2.4.0 released

From: Kai Vehmanen <kvehmanen@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sun Mar 13 2005 - 10:34:23 EET

1. Summary of changes

An annoying bug with handling filenames with whitespace has been
fixed. Integration with libsamplerate and other resamplers has
received a lot of attention and many bugs have been fixed.
Error reporting has been improved when loading invalid chainsetups.
A new sum-mixdown mode has been added to the engine. Some minor
cosmetic changes have been made to the output produced by the
console ecasound interface. A log message history mechanism has
been added to the engine to help ECI app and script development.

---
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
* Fixed a bug present in 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 releases which broke
   handling spaces in filenames. This affected all file formats
   handled via external tools (ogg/mp3/flac/m4a/...).
* Improved support for handling commas in parameters such as
   filenames given to ECI commands and to the console ecasound
   interface. A section on "Filenames with commas not handled
   correctly" was added to the Ecasound User's Guide that
   provides more information about how commas and other special
   characters are handled by ecasound.
* Log message history added. The EIAM command 'int-log-history' shows
   you the recent log messages printed via Ecasound subsystem, and
   'int-set-log-history-length' sets the history buffer size.
   This should be a very useful tool for debugging ECI scripts
   and apps (insert int-log-history at suitable places in your
   code to get a detailed log of what happened in the engine).
* Cosmetic changes to ecasound output. In the interactive mode
   (does not affect wellformed output or -D), ecasound now wraps
   all lines so that they fit into 74 columns. I've copied the
   "... " prefix style from the python interpreter to print
   messages that do not fit on one line.
* Code added to analyze problems with chainsetups. If you
   now make common errors like:
     ecasound -i foo.wav -i foo.bar -o rtnull
   or
     ecasound -a:1 -i foo.wav -a:2 -i bar.wav -o rtnull
   ... ecasound will try to explain what is wrong with the
   configuration. This is related to edi-40, "Update to error and
   warning reporting mechanisms", development item.
* Integration with libsamplerate and other resamplers has
   received a lot of attention and many bugs have been fixed.
   Special thanks to Aaron Heller, Kamil Wencel and Julien Claassen
   for the extensive testing!
* Fixed segfaults related to buffersize and samplerate change
   events from JACK. Ecasound now gracefully shuts down if one
   of these events is received. Note that Ecasound is still not
   able to adapt to a new buffersize or samplerate on the fly.
* A new 'sum' mixing mode has been introduced. Traditionally
   Ecasound has used the averaging method of mixing multiple
   input channels into one output channel. This avoids the
   risk of clipping, but can lead to suprising results in
   certain use-cases. The 'sum' method is closer to the way
   an analog mixer works. To retain backwards compability, the
   'avg' mixing mode is still used as the default.
Full list of changes is available at:
  - http://www.eca.cx/ecasound/history.php
---
4. Interface and configuration file changes
* In string lists returned by ECI commands, all commas are
   now escaped with backslashes. This change was needed to
   make unambiguous parsing of the return values possible.
* Ecasound console output is pretty-printed to fit 74 columns.
   This does not affect output in well-formed (-d:256) and
   plain-text (-D) modes.
---
5. Contributors to this release
Patches - Accepted code, documentation and build system changes
   * Vitaly Belostotsky and Junichi Uekawa (1):
       Bugs in compressor presets defined in effect_presets
   * Steve Harris and Tim Blechmann (1):
       Float anti-denormal routines from swh-plugins
   * Eric Dantan Rzewnicki (1):
       Manpage fixes
Bug Hunting - Reports that led to bugfixes (items closed)
   * Jan Weil (3):
       Comma-escaping problems with EIAM return values
   * Aaron Heller, Kamil Wencel and Julien Claassen (1):
       Bugs in resampling with libsamplerate.
   * Didier Bellamy (1):
       Bug in aac/m4a encoding
   * Erik de Castro Lopo (1):
       Bug in resampling with libsamplerate
   * Jesse Chappell (1):
       Bug in resampling with libsamplerate
   * Frederik Eaton (1):
       Whitespace handling bugs ogg/mp3/ext support
   * Mario Lang (1):
       Regex metachars in LADSPA plugin description fields
       were not properly escaped
   * Philippe Schelté aka Dubphil (1):
       Denormal problems in Ecasound filters.
   * Junichi Uekawa (1):
       Whitespace handling bugs ogg/mp3/ext support.
---
6. Links and files
Web site (and mirrors):
 	http://www.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-2.4.0.tar.gz
 	md5sum: 31693eb47ddb8b6f1ff8616c86265afe
List of distributions with maintained Ecasound support:
 	See http://www.eca.cx/download.php
-- 
  http://www.eca.cx
  Audio software for Linux!

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Received on Thu Mar 17 12:15:13 2005

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