[MusicKit-announce] MusicKit 5.5.1 released

[Leigh S. <le...@le...>]

After far too long, there is a new MusicKit release. Of course, 
development has been progressing continuously since the 5.4.4 release, 
but somehow, things were always in such a state of flux that releasing 
a new distribution always required some extra work, and then a more 
pressing bug would appear, and the release would get put off to fix 
that and then another bug would loom...etc...

To atone for my tardiness, the new release does offer some definite 
improvements. The most apparent should be that the build process has 
now been massively simplified and modernised and the standard autoconf 
process put in place to allow users to get the code compiled without 
having to install all the dependent libraries. So ./configure; sudo 
make install should now work. On MacOS X, all the examples build. On 
GNUstep systems (Linux/Windows), only the frameworks are currently 
built until I can test the GNUstep build process (lacking Intel 
hardware at the moment).

The SndKit has been thoroughly overhauled and now has a low-latency 
pre-emptive queuing scheme for streaming, producing very fast playback 
of sounds. SndSoundStruct is now endangered and is in the process of 
being removed in a future release. There are good object oriented 
alternatives, so if developers are using that structure, now is the 
time to move off it. SndMP3 has been rewritten to use either 
pre-decompression or on-the-fly decompression, allowing the developer 
to select the trade off between speed and memory. libst (Sox) file I/O 
support has been replaced with libsndfile support which offers much 
better support for modern formats and cleans up the file I/O code 
considerably.

Many of the memory leaks of the MusicKit have been shaken out and work 
has begun on rewriting MKOrchestra to do native synthesis (as a 
subclass of SndStreamClient), although that is not yet operational. 
MIDI is now managed in a modern fashion, allowing devices with 
differing input and output ports to be reported and used.

There are just too many changes to even upload a ChangeLog anymore! You 
can get the gruesome details from the web site.

I should have a binary out soon.
--
Leigh M. Smith
mailto:le...@le...
http://www.leighsmith.com