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*** ecasound - README                                               ***
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 What is it?
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Ecasound is a sound processing application designed for basic effect
processing, mixing, multitrack recording and signal recycling. It 
supports OSS and ALSA sound drivers, wav, mp3, aiff, cdda, au, snd,
raw and standard file streams (all can be used both as inputs and 
outputs). Effects can be combined both in series and in parallel, while
effect parameters can be controlled in realtime with oscillators and 
MIDI controllers. Ecasound package currently consists of: ecasound - 
a versatile console mode interface, qtecasound - a Qt-based
X-interface and various command-line utils suitable for batch processing.

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 Why?
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I've programmed ecasound for my own recording purposes. The first 
versions ran under IBM Os/2. I used them for finalizing my analog 
4-track recordings. My 4-track was a nice tool, but it had its limits.
So eventually I started to use Windows-based multitrack software. I
still used ecasound for fx processing and finalizing. When I 
ported ecasound to Linux, a lot of the code was rewritten from 
scratch. During this I also added multitrack capabilities
to ecasound. It took a lot of work, but in the end I was able to 
get rid of all my Windows recording software. Nowadays I use 
ecasound for all my music projects. Because of this, I also 
continue to improve and develop ecasound.

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 Installing 
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First of all, you should first try to use the binary-rpm release.
It's probably the easiest and the most straigthforward way to 
install this software. 

If you need to compile ecasound, you'll find detailed instructions 
from the file 'INSTALL'.

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 Documentation 
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- man pages
	- ecasound(1)
	- qtecasound(1)
	- ecatools(1)
	- ecasoundrc(5)
- HTML docs (incomplete)
	- Documentation/index.html
- command line help (most up-to-date source)
	- (qt)ecasound -h 

Probably the best place to start is the examples section of 
the HTML-documentation (Documentation/examples.html).

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 Requirements
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To run ecasound, you need...:

- POSIX compliant UNIX system; I use Linux 2.2.x, glibc 2.1.x
- POSIX threads; I use linuxthreads 0.7 (libpthread)
- for soundcard input/output: OSS, OSS/Lite or ALSA drivers
- for mp3 support, mpg123 (input) and lame (output) packages
- for .aiff and .au/.snd support, libaudiofile (SGI audio file) library

To compile ecasound, you also need...:

- standard C++ build environment; I use egcs 1.1.2
  (STL and exceptions need to be supported)
- GNU make, automake and autoconf packages

To run qtecasound, you need...:

- qt 2.x development environment and runtime libraries

To compile qtecasound, you also need...:

- qt 2.x development environment

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 Web sites
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Ecasound home site
- http://www.wakkanet.fi/ecasound/

Sculpscape, music recorded and mixed with ecasound
- http://www.wakkanet.fi/sculpscape/
	 
Qt libraries
- http://www.troll.no/dl/
	 
OSS sound drivers
- http://www.opensound.com

ALSA sound drivers (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)
- http://www.alsa-project.org
	
lame mp3 encoder
- http://internet.roadrunner.com/~mt/mp3/
	 
mpg123 mp3 decoder
- http://dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de/~olli/mpg123/

SGI Audio File Library implementation for Linux
- http://www.68k.org/~michael/audiofile/
	
Sound, synthesis and audio reproduction - a great audio-DSP site!
- http://www.helsinki.fi/~ssyreeni/dsound/edsound.html

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 Author 
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Kai Vehmanen - mailto:kaiv@wakkanet.fi

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 Credits / Thanks to
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Dyson, John S. - for his fantastic compressor code (-eca)
Endersz, Viktor - for sending me the compressor source code (-eca)

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 Licensing/distribution policy
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Copyright (C) 1997-1999 Kai Vehmanen

Ecasound is freely distributable according to the terms of the 
GNU General Public License (see the file 'COPYING').

This program is distributed without any warranty. See the file 
'COPYING' for details. 

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