Ecasound

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Ecasound
Developed by	Kai Vehmanen
Initial release	?
Stable release	2.4.6 _[+/−]
Preview release	2.4.6 _[+/−]
Written in	?
OS	Cross-platform
Platform	IA32, PowerPC, ARM, SPARC
Available in	?
Genre	hard-disk recording audio processing
License	Free software
Website	http://eca.cx/ecasound/

Ecasound is a hard-disk recording and audio processing tool for Unix-like computer operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

Ecasound allows flexible interconnection of audio inputs, files, outputs, and effects algorithms, realtime-controllable by builtin oscillators, MIDI, or interprocess communication via GUI front-end. Ecasound supports JACK and LADSPA effects plug-ins.

The team leader is Kai Vehmanen, with dozens of contributors. Kai joined the project in 1995, when it was called wavstat, a simple DSP utility running under OS/2. Available under the GNU General Public License, Ecasound is free software.

[edit] User Interface

Ecasound is a command-line tool: it does not include a native graphical interface. Major tasks (recording, mixdown) can be easily performed directly from the command line interface, or by scripts. Several GUI front-ends have been written for it:

EcaEnveloptor Creates envelopes for ecasound objects, requires PyGTK & pyecasound. Non-realtime. By Arto Hamara (13/06/2001)
Ecmd Multitrack recording and mixing, includes mixer panel and effects panel. Tcl/Tk-based. By Joel Roth (11/11/2006)
EMi Mastering interface, virtual rackmount effect. Python-based. By Felix Le Blanc (27/04/2006)
GAS Graphical Audio Sequencer. Multitrack recording and mixing. GTK based. by Luke Tindall. (2001) (?-site down)
TkEca Controls almost all features: multitrack recorder/mixer. Tcl/Tk interface. By Luis Gasparotto (29/01/2004)
Visecas Preserves Ecasound semantics: edits chains & audio objects, not tracks/regions. GTK+ based. By Jan Weil (22/01/2004)