ANNOUNCE: BEAST/BSE v0.5.6

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.6 is available for download at:

  ftp://beast.gtk.org/pub/beast/v0.5/
or
  http://beast.gtk.org/beast-ftp/v0.5/

BEAST (the Bedevilled Audio SysTem) is a graphical front-end to
BSE (the Bedevilled Sound Engine), a library for music composition,
audio synthesis, MIDI processing and sample manipulation.
The project is hosted at:

  http://beast.gtk.org

A mailing list is available at:

  http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/beast/

This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of
the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound
generation back-end separated from all GUI activities.

The most outstanding new features are the demo song, the effect and
instrument management abilities, the track editor which allowes
for easy selection of synthesizers or samples as track sources, loop
support in songs and unlimited Undo/Redo capabilities.


Overview of Changes in BEAST/BSE 0.5.6:

* New (or ported) modules:
  BseEvaluator  - highly experimental (available with --devel) expression
                  evaluator by Stefan Westerfeld
  DavBassFilter - a low-pass resonant TB-303 style filter by David A. Bartold
* Added support for author and licensing information for plugins,
  available as "Show Info" in the button3 popup menu on modules
* Started MIDI file import ability
* Started new undo-able parasite mechanism for BSE files
* Fixed default value serialization in BSE files
* IDL Compiler bug fixes and cleanups [Stefan Westerfeld]
* Started C++ Language Binding [Stefan Westerfeld]
* Added i18n support to IDL Compiler [Stefan Westerfeld]
* Added #include-impl support to IDL Compiler [Stefan Westerfeld]
* Added toplevel package tests in tests/ [Stefan Westerfeld]
* Support upper case note names
* Internationalized plugins
* Merged translation domains
* Updated Czech translation [Miloslav Trmac]
* Updated Dutch translation [Vincent van Adrighem]
* Updated German translation [Christian Neumair]
* Updated Serbian translation [Danilo Segan]
* Updated Spanish translation [Ismael Andres Rubio Rojas]
* Updated Swedish translation [Christian Rose]
* Added Catalan translation [Xavier Conde Rueda]
* Added Greek translation [Kostas Papadimas]
* Added Portuguese translation [Duarte Loreto]
* Complete rebuild of the GUI code by moving to XML based widget tree stencils
* Completely recoded menu generation, activation and sensitivity, based
  on new simple action lists amd a stencil factory mechanism
* Rewrote all existing property entry fields and added new types
* Implemented a couple new widgets to improve GUI experience (GxkMenuButton
  as GtkOptionMenu replacement, GxkSimpleLable for shortened widths, ...)
* Added accelerator support for popup menus
* Lots of overall GUI polishing
* Added "About" box
* Miscellaneous bug fixes, lots of code cleanups


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ciaoTJ