NEWS

Another release in the series of "often releases" till 1.0. The code-name for this release is Debian Packages: less is more as we have reduced the number of debian packages. Now all clam libraries comes packaged in a single .deb. In addition, we now keep architecture independent example data in different packages. In the future we plan to extract functionality and dependencies out of the big package to smaller plugin packages. Audio back-ends, codecs and processing collections are good candidates for this. This is actually that the road gstreamer and other projects take.

Remember that you can install them by adding a new source in your /etc/apt/sources.list

  deb http://clam-project.org/download/linux-debian-sid ./
  deb http://clam-project.org/download/linux-ubuntu-edgy ./ 
  deb http://clam-project.org/download/linux-ubuntu-feisty ./ 
	

Next release 0.98 (due very soon) will take MacOSX packages definitively back. By now, the CLAM build system is already prepared for mac, so if you want to compile the apps, you'll find instructions in this how-to. Thanks Volker for all the feedback he is providing!

For details on this release changes, check the CLAM changelog and the NetworkEditor changelog.

A new release code-named The Most Stable NetworkEditor Ever is available to download. So imagine what is this release about. More info in the CLAM changelog and the NetworkEditor changelog

Check out the CLAM planet made of blogs of CLAM related people.

For several years we have been using a non-public development list, with much more traffic than the public list. Today the devel-list goes also public. Subscribe if you want to participate or have a close eye into the development. We'd like to copy relevant threads from the old devel-list, so don't be surprise if your inbox gets tons of mails one of these days.

Find links for both the planet and the mailing lists in the navigation menu.

After several months without a stable release but lots of development activity, we are pleased to announce CLAM 0.95

Most important in this release is NetworkEditor 0.4, with a radically reworked UI based on Qt4.2, lots of work on stability and usability, and new visual-prototyping features.

You can visually prototype standalone apps (or audio plugins): Edit audio networks with NetworkEditor, then edit its UI using Qt Designer and CLAM widgets plugins. Finally, Prototyper let you run the audio network with its UI.

This is better shown in this quick tutorial

This release comes with many new processings, mostly spectral transformations. But we want to highlight the tonal-analysis which does chords identification at real-time, and its related visualizations. This code is based on the work done by researchers at Queen Mary University (London) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). More credits are in the About box.

These and many other improvements can be found in the ChangeLog.

This release brings new packages for Linux (Debian sid/etch, Ubuntu edgy and feisty) and Windows installers. In Linux, you can simply add new sources to /etc/apt/sources.list

  deb http://clam-project.org/download/linux-debian-sid ./
  deb http://clam-project.org/download/linux-ubuntu-edgy ./ 

Both Linux and Windows comes with desktop integration and several examples ready to use. Mac OSX packages will be catching up next weeks.

What happens when you project a large complex Network that is being designed in the NetworkEditor into a 3-story high immersive sphere? See for yourself.

Apart from developing CLAM, Xavier Amatriain is the technical manager of one of the world's largest immersive spaces. The Allosphere is a 3-story high immersive sphere in an anechoic cube that is currently being developed at the University of California Santa Barbara. Once equipped it will have around 15 high definition active stereo projectors and around 500 speakers for immersive audio synthesis. It will be used for scientific visualization/auralization. But for now, it can be used for cool demos to navigate inside the brain or to debug a complex Network that does not fit in your screen!

Check out the CLAM testfarm page. Each new code check in (commit) awakes a number of testfarm clients in different platforms. They build CLAM from scratch, run automatic-tests and even publish some installers. It is also useful to monitor the repository activity such as the updated files and the check in comments.

Testfarm is a CLAM brother project but not CLAM specific. So you can use it to monitor any development that can be managed with command-line. It is similar to Mozilla Thinderbox and Buildbot but more light-weight and with some interesting features like automatic diagrams.

  $ svn co http://clam-project.org/clam/trunk clam 

This command will create a local copy of the repository with the following main directories: CLAM, NetworkEditor, SMSTools, Annotator, Voice2MIDI. Installation instructions are on CLAM/INSTALL

To update the sandbox (local copy of the repository) do: $ svn up
To check for current revision and new changes in the repository do: $ svn status -qu
To commit: well, send patches to the list.

We are currently in the ACM Multimedia conference in Santa Barbara, California. We just received the multimedia open-source award and also gave a demo of the latest CLAM features.

(Know the developers: Sitting left to right, Xavier, David and Pau.)

The development team is currently at PLoP (Program Languages of Programming Conference) 2006 in Portland, Oregon, in conjunction with OOPSLA. We are presenting this catalog consisting on eleven design patterns that contains our experience developing the CLAM framework and other systems. The patterns aim at offering a generative pattern language that falls within a generic data-flow architecture. The catalog is divided in four categories:

• General Data-flow Patterns, that address problems about how to organize high-level aspects of the data-flow architecture, by having different types of modules connections;
• Flow Implementation Patterns, that address how to physically transfer tokens from one module to another, according to the types of flow defined by the general data-flow patterns. Tokens life-cycle, ownership and memory management are recurrent issues in those patterns; and finally,
• Network Usability Patterns, that address how humans can interact with data-flow networks.

Patterns at PLoP are discussed and improved in small writer's workshops, and we are very pleased to have Ralph Johnson as our workshop chair!

On a different matter of things, the new (still unreleased) Network Editor and Prototyper are getting a lot of improvements. To get an idea see the development screenshots gallery.

It is our pleasure to announce that CLAM has won the 2006 ACM Open Source Multimedia Contest. According to the jury: CLAM is a remarkably comprehensive system with impressive capabilities. The award will be presented in the forthcoming ACM Multimedia Conference. The ACM Open Source Competition is a prestigious international contest that is now in its third year. Last year, for instance, the award was given to the OpenVidia library for GPU accelerated Computer Vision.

CLAM is coordinated by Xavier Amatriain at the University of California Santa Barbara but is mostly developed at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain) by a team led by Pau Arumi and David Garcia. CLAM is now being developed thanks to a grant from the STSI at the Catalan Government (Generalitat de Catalunya).

This award culminates 5 years of ongoing research and development and the authors wish to thank all the past developers as well as all of our users and people who have given support throughout these years.

CLAM 0.91.0 released: Spectral transformations, annotator, packaging, and desktop integration

We are glad to announce the 0.91.0 CLAM release which comes by the hand with Music Annotator 0.3.2, Network Editor 0.3.1 and SMSTools 0.4.1. They are available for download as source tarballs and also as binary packages for Windows, Ubuntu dapper, Debian sid and Fedora Core 5. MacOsX binaries are not available for this release, but we promise they will be back soon.

This release is the first official one which incorporates the new CLAM Music Annotator featuring chord extraction.

Almost 30 new spectral transformations have been incorporated into the processing repository. Some of them are already available from the NetworkEditor.

Application usage has received some extra stress on this release. Applications are better integrated on Windows and Linux desktops. Step by step application tutorials are available on the clam wiki for Music Annotator, SMSTools, Network Editor and Prototyper. And, all of them all provide examples to start with.

Please read these and other improvements in the changelog. We expect as much feedback as possible from all our users. Besides the mailing list, you can likely find us at #clam channel on FreeNode (IRC network).

CLAM Music Annotator 0.3.1 has been released

We are proud to announce this major release of Annotator with lots of new features.

You can learn more about Music Annotator in its wiki page, which includes screenshots and videos galleries

The application comes with two example extractors. One that computes low level descriptors and another that performs chord detection. It also features useful views such as the "tonnetz" and "key space" to visualise the tonal features (chords, notes...)

What's new from last (0.2) version ?

This is a major release which have at least duplicated the number of important features: Ported to Qt4; New chord extractor; Colourful animated visualisations; Improved application work-flow (project building, etc.) and it also works as a collaborative annotation tool (BOCA client)

See the changelog for a complete list of changes. Or the wiki page for general information about Annotator.

How to install it?

In Windows we provide a binary installer which includes all the needed libraries (including Qt4) and ready-to-use sample data.

For Linux and Mac OSX we don't provide binaries at this moment (though we plan to do in short). Source tarballs can be downloaded from the web and complete build instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.

Check out the download page.

This short guide explains how to get the chord extraction working.

Spanish and Catalan translations of the web

You can notice the language menu in the top-right hand corner. With these translation we close a long chapter of big web changes, (and we hope it will remain closed for a very long time). To reduce the overhead of keeping different versions in up-to-date and in sync Maarten de Boer has set up some perl scripts that takes the strings from the original (english) web and its correspondent translations from plain text files. That worked excelent! And he will most likely release these scripts very soon.

You'll also notice that we are using the new CLAM wiki more and more.

Interview to Xavier Amatriain in LaFarga.org

LaFarga.org have published a long interview to Xavier Amatriain about free sofware topics and CLAM. It's in catalan only.

CLAM web has been reworked

Although the overall appearance of the web remains almost the same, we have cleaned all the html, so it's much easier to change and keep updated. You'll probably need to force reload the pages from your browser.

Debian/Ubuntu/Breezy packages repository available

We currently support i386 binary packages for breezy. This is the simplest way to install clam and its dependencies: just add the repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list. See our linux linux download section for details.

0.90 Release finally available!!

After several pre-releases, testing and bugfixing you can now find the final 0.90 release in our donwload section. Note that now you have the option of downloading the CLAM framework as a binary for your platform or with the source code. Major highlights of this release are the new binary distribution, a new build system based in Scons, major rework of some applications, support for VST plugins...

Read more here

New year: New website, new logo, new address

If you are reading this you will have noticed that we have changed the design of both our website and our logo. The main website address has moved to http://clam.iua.upf.edu. So, even though we will keep the redirection for some time, please update your links.

Read more here

0.90 Prerelease available

During the coming weeks we will be publishing a series of pre-releases for 0.90. You will find them in the donwload section. Apart from the regular source code from now on we will be publishing binary versions of the framework for all major platforms (GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows). Because this represents a major change in the distribution we do expect your collaboration and reports.

Read more here

Freesound reaches 10000!

Our companion Free project here at the MTG, Freesound, has reached the first goal of 10000 uploads. As a celebration they were featured in slashdot.

Read more on the Freesound Project website

CLAM support from the Catalan Government

This week it was finally made official: the Catalan Government (Generalitat) will be supporting CLAM through a special grant. The main goal of such grants is to support quality Free Software development in Catalonia.

Read more here

CLAM at ISMIR 2005

At the ISMIR 2005 conference held in London we presented a paper about one of the applications we are developing in the framework: the Annotator.

Read more here

CLAM presented at ICMC 2005

The latest developments in CLAM were presented at the ICMC 2005 conference held in Barcelona. You can read the overview paper entitled "Developing Cross-platform Audio and Music Applications with the CLAM Framework".

Read more here

Final release of CLAM 0.8.0 "Prototyper with streaming SMS transformations"

After two preview releases We are glad to announce the final 0.8.0 version of CLAM. This release has been thoroughly tested in GNU/Linux but not in Windows and OSX, which is a time consuming task to do with our current build system.

Read more here

Release 0.90 finally available

After several pre-releases, testing and bugfixing you can now find the final 0.90 release in our donwload section. Note that now you have the option of downloading the CLAM framework as a binary for your platform or with the source code. Major highlights of this release are the new binary distribution, a new build system based in Scons, major rework of some applications, support for VST plugins...

Read more details at the changelog.

The release announcement:

 Wed Feb 8 2006   CLAM 0.90 Released
======================================

'New multiplied build-system, fancy applications and inter-
 connectivity'

    What is CLAM?
    CLAM is a framework for research and application development
    in the Audio and Music Domain. It offers a conceptual model
    as well as tools for the analysis, synthesis and processing
    of audio signals.


We are glad to announce that our new 0.90 release is already
available at our (also brand new) website: http://clam.iua.upf.edu.
This release represents a big step forward to our soon to come
first stable 1.0 release and includes major improvements.

For the first time the CLAM framework and all related applications
are available in binary form for all major platforms: deb packages
are provided for Ubuntu/Debian GNU/Linux, dmg images for Mac OSX
and setup executables for Windows. This change has represented a
complete but necessary (and painful!) rework of our build system,
which is now based on small binary libraries and uses Scons as
the build tool. We expect it to reduce drastically the complexity
of the compilation and installation of clam applications for the
end-user.

Other major improvements include a complete rework of the SMSTools,
application GUI, which is now based on Qt, as well as many
additions to the Annotator app.

A CLAM Network can now also become an Open Sound Control (OSC)
node, opening up the possibility of interconnection to external
applications. In the 'Application Prototyping' chapter we'd like
to mention that we have also added complete tools to create both
VST and LADSPA plugins out of a previously designed network.
It is also worth noticing the possibility of creating stand-alone
applications with a GUI created using the great Qt-designer and
the CLAM Qt-plugins. Such standalone applications can behave
either as a Jack client (for GNU/Linux and Mac OSX) or use audio
backends like alsa or Portaudio.

Please read these and other improvements in the attached changelog
and visit our website and/our mailing list for further announcements.

Although we are continuing to work toward the 1.0 release and we
expect to come up with new improvements soon, we hope all these
additions already convert the framework into a more usable and
useful tool and, as always, we expect as much feedback as possible
from all our users.


The CLAM team 

New year: New website, new logo, new address

If you are reading this you will have noticed that we have changed the design of both our website and our logo. The main website address has moved to http://clam.iua.upf.edu. So, even though we will keep the redirection for some time, please update your links.

This website has been possible thanks to the grant from the Catalan government. It is currently being translated and will soon be available in catalan and spanish.

CLAM 0.90 Prereleases available

During the coming weeks we will be publishing a series of pre-releases for 0.90. You will find them in the donwload section. Apart from the regular source code from now on we will be publishing binary versions of the framework for all major platforms (GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows). Because this represents a major change in the distribution we do expect your collaboration and reports.

New year: new website, new logo, new address...

If you are reading this you will have noticed that we have changed the design of both our website and our logo. The main website address has moved to http://clam.iua.upf.edu. So, even though we will keep the redirection for some time, please update your links.

This website has been possible thanks to the grant from the Catalan government. It is currently being translated and will soon be available in catalan and spanish.

CLAM support from the Catalan Government

This week it was finally made official: the Catalan Government (Generalitat) will be supporting CLAM through a special grant. The main goal of such grants is to support quality Free Software development in Catalonia. We hope to make good use of the grant and be able to bring CLAM to its 1.0 release. You can read the official announcement here.

CLAM at ISMIR 2005

At the ISMIR 2005 conference held in London we presented a paper about one of the applications we are developing in the framework: the Annotator. You can read the entitled "The CLAM Annotator: A Cross-platform Audio Descriptors Editing Tool" here.

CLAM presented at ICMC 2005

The latest developments in CLAM were presented at the ICMC 2005 conference held in Barcelona. You can read the overview paper entitled "Developing Cross-platform Audio and Music Applications with the CLAM Framework" here.

Final release of CLAM 0.8.0 "Prototyper with streaming SMS transformations"

After two preview releases We are glad to announce the final 0.8.0 version of CLAM. This release has been thoroughly tested in GNU/Linux but not in Windows and OSX, which is a time consuming task to do with our current build system.

Announcement letter

After two preview releases We are glad to announce the final 0.8.0 version of CLAM. This release has been thoroughly tested in GNU/Linux but not in Windows and OSX, which is a time consuming task to do with our current build system. The reason for thas is very simple: The current build system in Win and OSX is not completely automatic and requires some hand-tweeking. Instead of loosing time on that, we prefer concentrating effords in a new build system based on scons and library binaries, which promises being much more cross-platform frienly, among other goodies.

The next release (0.8.1) with the new build system will happen soon, because we have already been successfull in our first tests compiling CLAM library binaries and linking apps against it.

Now, going back to our current release, these are some of the important additons since 0.7.0

• Rapid application-prototyping. Build a CLAM application in two easy steps: Designing the processing network with the NetworkEditor and the application GUI using QtDesigner and the CLAM plugin featuring widgets for visualizing streaming data.
• Annotator. Another new CLAM application. It is a manual edition tool in which you can visualize and edit low-level and high-level descriptors of virtually any kind, segmentation marks.. The idea is to offer a tool for fine-tuning, visualizing, editing and testing description extraction algorithms.
• Enhanced CLAM Networks. NetworkEditor can run SMS transformations in streaming. Moreover the processing network can receive controls from Open Sound Control (OSC) messages and translate outcoming controls to OSC messages.
• QtPlots. Now features editable segmentation marks on all the plots, a break-point-function editor with auralization, a spectrogram plot and other goodies. See the doxygen doc to learn how to use it.
• XML enhancements including better error handling and reporting, an experimental backend based on libxml++ as an alternative to XercesC++ and partial document operations. Libxml++ is planned to be the official back-end on future releases but still some work is needed on error messages reporting.

For details in CLAM-specific new features, please refere to the ChangeLog

Compared to the last preview (pre2) release, these are the additions : (sumarized)

New libxml++ back-end, CLAM::Audio bugfixes and interface changes related to SetDuration and SetEndTime (keeping back compatibility), and lot and lots of small bugfixes and code cleanup.

CLAM to be presented at the Linux Audio Conference 2005

Our submitted paper "CLAM, an Object Oriented Framework for Audio and Music" has been accepted at the 2005 Linux Audio Conference.

We look forward to meeting you there!

January 28th, 2005

CLAM at the Workshop on The Future of Music Software One-day Workshop

The Music Technology Group and the Technology Department and Universitat Pompeu Fabra invite you to one-day music-software workshop, sponsored by S2S. On Friday January 28th there will be talks, a discussion panel and a hands-on workshop in which different environments, including CLAM, will be presented.

Read more at the S2S website

CLAM related Phd defended

Xavier Amatriain will defend his Thesis , most of which is related to his work in CLAM.

CLAM release 0.7 'Easier deployment, better plots and Processing Networks'

We are glad to announce CLAM long-waited release 0.7. Main highlights in this release are:

• An easier deployment on GNU/Linux. After rewriting the configure.ac we are happy to say that now CLAM is easier to install on any distribution. If you are one of those that tried to install CLAM and you gave up because you didn't know how to handle the dependencies, please try this new relase. Among other things, you are now allowed to disable support for certain libraries at configure time.
• Progress in the CLAM Processings networks mode. We are almost there. Very soon you will be able to become a real clammer without writing a single line of code through the already usable Network Editor.
• Better Plots. Built using the QT framework and the qwt library we added new and more convenient plots with features such as: an audio plot with temporal markers, the possibility of quickly changing the color map to get a nice screenshot for your articles...
• Low-level descriptors have been thoroughly tested.

And much more... please read the changelog for more details.

Looking forward for your feedback.

CLAM at ISMIR

The MTG is organizing the 2004 International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR, for short) (see ISMIR webpage). In this context on sunday september 10th there will be a tutorial on "Software Frameworks for Analysis of Audio and Music Signals" in which George Tzanetakis and Xavier Amatriain will give a general overview and will present both Marsyas and CLAM more in depth. More details here.

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