*** Ecamegapedal - README (maintainer: Kai Vehmanen) ***
What is it?
Ecamegapedal is a real-time effect processor software with a graphical user interface for controlling the effect parameters. It is meant to be used as a virtual guitar-fx or studio effect box. In addition to real-time operation, Ecamegapedal also supports reading from and writing to audio files. All audio object and effect plugin types provided by the Ecasound libraries are supported. This includes ALSA, JACK, OSS, aRts, over 20 file formats, over 30 effect types, LADSPA plugins and multi-operator effect presets. Ecamegapedal's implementation is based on Ecasound and Qt libraries.
Primary platform for running Ecamegapedal is Linux. Ecamegapedal also works on many UNIX-derived systems such as FreeBSD and Solaris.
Requirements
To run Ecamegapedal, you need...:
- operating system that provides standard POSIX interfaces; has been tested with various combinations of GNU/Linux (Linux 2.2/2.4/2.6 and glibc 2.1/2.2/2.3 combinations), FreeBSD 4.x
- POSIX threads support; has been tested with glibc linuxthreads and Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL)
- Ecasound libraries
- qt 2.x/3.x runtime libraries
To compile Ecamegapedal, you also need...:
- standard C++ build environment; tested with egcs 2.91.66, gcc 2.95.2, gcc 3.0, gcc 3.1 and gcc 3.2 (STL and exceptions need to be supported)
- GNU make, automake and autoconf packages
- qt 2.x/3.x development environment
Installing
First of all, you should first try to install from a binary package (in rpm, dpkg, etc format, depending on your system). This is probably the easiest and most straigthforward way to install Ecamegapedal.
If you need to compile Ecamegapedal, the file 'INSTALL' contains detailed instructions. To build RPM source and binary packages from the source tar package, issue "rpm -ta ecamegapedal-x.y.x.tar.gz".
Documentation
There's not much documentation available, but this shouldn't matter much as Ecamegapedal is quite straightforward and easy to use. Ecamegapedal documentation is updated whenever new features are added or old features have been modified. Some things are not documented in great detail, but on the other hand, all documentation is kept up-to-date. The primary documentation sources are:
- ecamegapedal(1) man page
- command line help (ecamegapedal --help)
- ecasound documentation
Ecasound mailing lists
ecasound-announce@wakkanet.fi:
A read-only list for announcements concerning
ecasound and ecawave.
A general discussion forum for ecasound/ecawave
developers and users. Announcements of new versions, bug warnings, etc
will be posted to this list. If you have problems compiling,
installing or using ecasound apps, this is a good place to ask for
help. Reports of working software/hardware combinations are also welcome.
You can browse the message archives at
http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/ecasound-list/current/
You can join the lists by sending subscribe message to majordomo@wakkanet.fi. You can also join using the following web front-end: http://eca.cx/mlists.html
Web sites
Ecasound and Ecamegapedal home site
- http://www.eca.cx
Distribution packages
- http://ecasound.seul.org/download/
About free open-source software (FOSS) development
You should keep in mind that FOSS [*] development process differs greatly from closed commercial development. Active participation, both from developers and users, is what pushes a FOSS project forward. Every succesful FOSS project has an active userbase behind it. This means that your comments, ideas and bug reports are extremely important. If something does not work, or some feature is missing, be active. Either try to fix the problem yourself, or report it on the ecasound-list mailing list.
[*] Although Ecamegapedal is free software (http://www.gnu.org), it also
fits the definition of open-source software (http://www.opensource.org/). Although the two initiatives have different goals, they also share a lot in common. I use the term FOSS to refer to both of them, while still acknowledging the difference between the two.
Stable and development versions
Although publically released versions are called stable, this is not a guarantee of any kind. Before releases I run through a small set of test cases to verify that all basic features are working. I also use the latest versions for my own work. But other than that, there is no guarantee that Ecamegapedal won't eat your data. On the other hand, as Ecamegapedal is free software, you have the possibility to review Ecamegapedal's source code, perform tests, and fix any bugs you might find. The more people there are that do this, the more stable Ecamegapedal will eventually become! So join the fun! :)
Author
Kai Vehmanen - mailto:kai.vehmanen@wakkanet.fi
Contributors / credits / thanks to
Hamara, Arto - Icon pix maps, bug fixes and improvements to
the user-interface code. [artham] Ritscher, Meinhard - Author of KCorrMeter from which Ecamegapedal's
VU-meter code originates. [mritscher]
all LAD members - always a great source of inspiration www.niccx.com - for eca.cx, ecasound.cx and ecawave.cx domains SEUL - for hosting ftp, http and CVS sites Wakkanet Oy - for hosting Ecamegapedal and other ecasound web sites
Licensing/distribution policy
Copyright (C) 2001,2003-2004 Kai Vehmanen
Ecamegapedal 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.