Ecasound is a hard-disk recording and audio processing tool for Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 computer operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s including Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, and FreeBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

.

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

JACK Audio Connection Kit

JACK is a professional sound server daemon that provides real-time, low latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications that implement its API...

 and LADSPA

LADSPA

LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developers Simple Plugin API. It is a standard for handling filters and effects, licensed under the GNU LGPL. It was originally designed for Linux through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers Mailing List, but works on a variety of other platforms...

 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

Digital signal processing

Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of discrete time signals by a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals. Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing...

 utility running under OS/2. Available under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

, Ecasound is free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

.

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)
• Nama Multitrack recorder, mixer and mastering application. Tk and ReadLine interfaces. By Joel Roth (13/01/2010)
• 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)