SWEEP, a sound wave editor, brought to you by Conrad Parker
-----------------------------------------------------------

Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and
compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including
WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and
LADSPA effects plugins. Inside lives a pesky little virtual stylus called
Scrubby who enjoys mixing around in your files.

Sweep is designed to be intuitive and to give you full control. It includes
almost everything you would expect in a sound editor, and then some:

        * precise, vinyl like scrubbing
        * looped, reverse, and pitch-controlled playback
        * playback mixing of unlimited independent tracks
	* monitoring support for use with multiple audio devices
        * looped and reverse recording
        * internationalisation
        * multichannel and 32 bit floating point file support
	* Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Speex compressed formats
	* sample rate conversion and channel operations
        * LADSPA 1.1 effects support
        * multiple views, discontinuous selections
        * easy keybindings, mouse wheel zooming
        * unlimited undo/redo with fully revertible edit history
        * multithreaded background processing
        * shaded peak/mean waveform rendering, multiple colour schemes


Summary of library dependencies:
--------------------------------

REQUIRED:

        * GTK+ 2.0, (version 2.4.0 or higher) standard in most
	  distributions and available from:

	    http://www.gtk.org/

        * libsndfile-1.0.x, available from:

            http://www.zip.com.au/~erikd/libsndfile/

	* Secret Rabbit Code, aka. libsamplerate, available from:

	    http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/

OPTIONAL:

	* Ogg Vorbis libraries (high quality perceptual audio format):

	    http://www.vorbis.com/

	* libmad (MPEG audio loading), available from:

	    http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/

 	* Speex library (an open speech compression format):

	    http://www.speex.org/

See the file INSTALL for building instructions. Generally all that is
required, after the above libraries have been installed, is:

	./configure
	make
	make install

If you are not sure what you need, simply run ./configure and it will probe
your system and provide a reasonably useful summary.

For information on enabling and disabling optional components, run
./configure --help

Homepage
--------

Detailed information and new releases of Sweep can be found at:

        http://sweep.sourceforge.net/

Mailing Lists
-------------

There are four mailing lists related to sweep:

sweep-announce
        which contains only announcements about new releases of sweep.
This is a moderated list.

sweep-users
	For general discussion about using sweep

sweep-devel
        For discussion about sweep development related issues.

sweep-i18n
	For discussion of language translation issues.

Archives of each list are available on the World Wide Web via the
Sweep homepage. You can also subscribe or unsubscribe via a web
interface.

For more information about using these lists or to subscribe or
unsubscribe via an email interface, send a message with just the word
`help' as subject or in the body, to:

        sweep-announce-request@lists.sourceforge.net
  or
        sweep-users-request@lists.sourceforge.net
  or
        sweep-devel-request@lists.sourceforge.net
  or
	sweep-i18n-request@lists.sourceforge.net

as appropriate.

Internet Relay Chat
-------------------

For usage and developer discussion, join the channel #sweep on
irc.freenode.net (established 2005).

Licence
-------

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307,
USA.

Acknowledgements
----------------

Thanks to Pixar Animation Studios and CSIRO Australia for supporting
the development of this project.

Contact
-------

If you have any further queries about Sweep, please contact the main
author:

Conrad Parker <conrad@vergenet.net>

Sun Jun 25 2006
---------------

the default driver is now the ALSA driver. see README.OSS for
information on using the OSS driver instead.

Wed Apr 30 2003
---------------

Support for ALSA 0.9 is functional and could do with widespread testing.

To build with alsa support, simply configure with:

	./configure --enable-alsa

Note that this will build a binary which will work with ALSA only, and
not attempt to use OSS. In future this will be replaced with plugins
for different pcm i/o methods, which should ease binary distribution.

Wed Sep 11 2002
---------------

ALSA native support it currently not working; to even attempt to build the
code, you must configure with:

	./configure --enable-experimental --enable-alsa

However, Sweep works fine with ALSA under OSS emulation.

Sat Oct  7 2000
---------------

Support for ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) version 0.6.0 was
added by Paul Barton-Davis <pbd@op.net>.

To build sweep with support for ALSA 0.6.0, do:

        ./configure --enable-alsa
        make

Paul writes:

  To use ALSA, you need --enable-alsa as an arg to configure,
  because just discovering ALSA is not deemed to be sufficient to use
  it (at this time).

  A couple of things to note:

         * this is ALSA 0.6.0, which is only available via CVS right now
         * this code is totally different than the code needed for 0.5.X
         * you also need a ~/.asoundrc file to define the
               characteristics of various "named PCM devices"
         * you can define the environment variable SWEEP_ALSA_PCM to
               the name of the PCM device you want sweep to use
         * if its not defined, sweep will try to open a named PCM
               device called "sweep"

Wed Oct 30 2002
---------------

Some compile fixes were applied as listed in Sourceforge bug #625528.
Please contact sweep-devel@lists.sf.net if you have any problems building
or running Sweep on Solaris.

Fri May 12 2000
---------------

Solaris audio support was added in sweep version 0.0.9 by Mattias
Engdeg�rd <f91-men@nada.kth.se>. It is configured in automatically
on such systems, ie. to build a Solaris binary do:

	./configure
	make

as specified in the file INSTALL.

Mattias writes:

        You may want to note that I didn't spend any effort on
        reducing the latency - the Solaris audio device has quite
        a large buffer and no documented way to reduce it. Thus
        it works, but may lag a couple of seconds sometimes. This
        should be no problem in practice, but if someone is
        displeased with the behaviour, I could outline a way to
        solve it.

How to do translations for sweep - a quick overview
===================================================

(Includes information from Mathieu Roy and Silvia Pfeiffer)

For more detailed information refer to:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/gettext/index.html


(1) How to create and test a translation for a new language?
------------------------------------------------------------
Grab the po/sweep.pot file and copy it to the new language,
naming the file after a language code as defined by ISO 639:
ll.po (e.g. fr.po), with a possible country-specific adaptation
as in ll_CC.po.
[For the codes, refer to
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Language-Codes.html#Language-Codes]

Translate the strings in that file and save it in the /po folder.

Edit the "configure.ac" file (in sweep-x.x.x folder), adding the
new language to the "ALL_LINGUAS directive.

Should look like this :
ALL_LINGUAS="fr se de"
AM_GNU_GETTEXT

The next "configure" will include the new language, the next
"make dist" will create the machine-readable translation, and the
next "make install" will copy it to the system folder where
gettext can find it.

Testing the new translation goes via setting of environment
variables (LANG is usually enough).

Mathieu recommends:
[user@host  /]$ export LANG="fr_FR"&&LC_ALL="fr"&&LINGUAS="fr"
(configures this terminal until you close it)
[user@host  /]$ sweep
(should work in french)



(2) How to keep the code and its translations up to date?
---------------------------------------------------------

When coding, keep marking displayed text with _("blah") where function
calls are possible or N_("blah") for statically defined strings. Where
the string is actually used in the program, you need to put another
_(variable) around it! A proposed guideline from gnu.org is to use
format strings instead of string concatenation and to keep sentences
within one string.

CAUTION: Be aware that when you mark a string with N_("blah"), this
only marks it for translation.

When creating new code files (.[ch]) with translatable strings in
them, they need to be added manually to the po/POTFILES.in file.
The next "configure" will then automatically take care of creating
the po/POTFILES file and the "make" thereafter will create the
updated po/sweep.pot file. For merging those updated strings into
existing translations, a "make dist" is required.

When a translator updates his/her translation file, copy it back to
the /po directory. It will be compiled into machine-readable form with
the next "make dist" and installed with the next "make install".