[CLAM] CLAM News

[xamat at iua.upf.es]

Hi CLAMers,

This list has been too quiet and we would like to inform all CLAM users
what is going on (specially for those that are not working in the next-door
office).

After Christmas holydays, the Music Technology Group moved to a new
building. Well, as a matter of fact we moved to the part of the building
where we used to be a year ago. But now we have new offices and
installations. As you can imagine, the process of moving had the CLAM
team stopped for almost a week.

This last week, we have also been quite busy organizing Richard Stallman's
visit to our university. You can read about it at the News section in
MTG's webpage (http://www.iua.upf.es/mtg). The visit was organized in the
context of the revision of the AGNULA project (www.agnula.org) in which
CLAM participates.

Ok, so what are we up to right now? I will try to briefly summarize what
the CLAM developers are doing now:

- Major addition to Dynamic Types: it has been many times stated that
DT should have inheritance capabilities. Now the solution is near and
we plan to add this major feature in next release.

- Analysis/Synthesis Example debugging and enhancement: we are testing
this example with different sounds/configurations and have found some
bugs that are being fixed in order to be able to use different window
sizes for sinusoidal and residual components, zero padding,... The
GUI is also being reworked.

- Testing: we are about to adopt production-grade testing strategies for
CLAM. We have been reading quite a lot and have done some tests using
cpp unit. This strategy will surely imply a better quality code in the
near future.

- MIDI File I/O: we are almost done adding MIDI File support to CLAM. We
hope to add it in next release.

- JACK: we are studying how to make CLAM applications JACK compliant. Jack
is a low-latency audio server for GNU/Linux (http://jackit.sourceforge.net/)

- Visual C++: we have got the chance to test a beta version of Microsoft
next Visual.Net release called Everett. Great news: Microsoft finally has
a compiler that is up to date to C++ standard (compliant to more than 98%).
It seems it will be publicly available in February. As soon as it is we
will probably start migrating Windows support to this platform and forget
about some nasty problems we have always had to make ANSI C++ compile in
Windows.

- Others: the CLAM library is being used by many projects in the MTG. The
input we get from them is helping in improving the code and its usage.

Please do not hesitate to send any comments/questions to this list.

Xavier Amatriain
CLAM Managing/Public Relations (and some coding in my spare time)