ANNOUNCE: The Snack Sound Toolkit v2.1b1

[Kare Sjolander]

This release contains:

* Support for reading the Ogg/Vorbis file format (free MP3 challenger)

* LPC spectral analysis contributed by Erhard Rank

* New IIR/FIR filter type contributed by Ted Dunning

* Support for WAV and AU files with 8-byte sample encodings

* Many bug fixes

* New/updated demos



Change log

3/16/01 (bug fix) Fixed misplaced comment which caused distorted MP3
decoding. (Wilkason)

3/21/01 (bug fix) Fixed problem for spectrogram canvas items that caused
a crash in some cases.

3/22/01 (bug fix) Corrected AU file format handler which incorrectly
handled Lin8 files as Lin8Offset.

3/23/01 (enhancement) Added read support for files with double (8-byte)
samples to AU and WAV file format handlers.

3/23/01 (bug fix) Fixed problems reading sound files containing float
samples.

3/27/01 (bug fix) Removed unnecessary limit on the number of channels
for audio I/O on the SGI platform.

3/27/01 (bug fix) Fixed problem with data copying that sometimes occured
when reallocating from a small size to a much larger one.

3/28/01 (bug fix) Corrected out of bounds problem in the pitch command.

4/10/01 (bug fix) Corrected bug in the snacksphere package for sound
files containing fewer samples than specified in the header.

4/15/01 (new feature) New filter type: iir, which implements IIR/FIR
filtering. (Dunning)

4/15/01 (new feature) LPC analysis support added in section canvas item
and in dBPowerSpectrum command. (Rank)

4/15/01 (enhancement) Slight beautification of Waveform postscript.
(Rank)

4/24/01 (new feature) Added support for the Ogg/Vorbis file format
(SnackOgg.c) through the optional package "snackogg".



The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting
language.
Currently it supports Tcl/Tk and Python.
Snack adds commands to play, record, and process sound and supports
in-memory sound objects, file based audio, and streaming audio.
It handles fileformats such as WAV, MP3, AU, AIFF, and CSL.
There are optional packages for NIST/Sphere and Ogg/Vorbis file formats.

Snack is extensible, new commands, filters, and sound file formats can
be added using the Snack C-library. An easy to build example extension
is contained in the source distribution.
Snack also does sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms.
The visualization objects update in real-time and can output postscript.

Snack works with Tcl8.0 - Tcl8.4 and Python 1.5.2-2.1
Platforms: Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, NetBSD, Macintosh, and
Windows 95/98/NT/2K.

Source and binaries can be downloaded from
http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/

Regards,
Kare Sjolander
kare at speech.kth.se