HI!

Thanks for tring AEdit 0.6B!

What is AEdit?! Well, I'll tell you!

AEdit is a full featured, multitrack recording/editing audio system.
It features 'Smooth' zoom and pan, as well as many other 'Neat-o' things.

....BUT.... This only a demo, and it's a beta, _AND_ I'm a very busy guy,
so many things have not yet been implemented. So if you don't
see a feature you need, drop me some email, and I'll move it
up my list.

What _is_ in this demo, is import, smooth zoom and pan, simple cut,
copy, and paste, and export of raw 16 bit, 44100Hz, stereo, sound files.
It handles hundreds of megabytes of data, without a problem.

And again, thanks for trying AEdit.

Howard
abramsh@acm.org

PS. Bugs reports welcome

Installation Instructions:
-------------------------

AEdit.06B.zip contains two files. This one,
and AEdit. Future relases will also contain
an HTML users guide, and filter plug-ins.

To start AEdit, double Click on the AEdit Icon,
or type "AEdit" in a shell.

Quick and Easy Get Started Instructions:
---------------------------------------

First the 'File' menu:
Deep down, AEdit wants to work on big projects, because
thats what it was designed to do. So first on the list
is 'Open Project' and 'Save Project'. They open and
save project _directories_. After you become use to
AEdit, and actually have something to save, try
using projects. There's nothing like opening a project
with 600M of audio data, and have it load in 0.25 seconds.
(Try it for yourself! I've test up to 65M.)

'Close' and 'Quit' do the same thing.

Then there is 'Import' and 'Export'. Quite simply,
they import and export raw or AIFF, 16 bit, 44100Hz, stereo, sound files.
When you import a file, it loads the audio and converts it into
AEdits internal format (currently 16bit/44100Hz, but future releases
will have support for 24 and 8 bit resolutions as well.) Then
it performs 'pre-processing' on the data. I won't go into
what this is, but it will take about 1/2 of the time it would
normally take to play the file, to import it. It also takes
up space (about 1.5 times what your data takes up).

Speaking of space, AEdit needs bunches of it.
But don't worry, about memory, it uses disk space instead.
My test case is 6.5 minutes of stereo audio (If you
must know, it's beck's 'deadweight'), and it runs
quite well using only 5 megs of memory.

Typical needs are about 1.5 times your raw audio. Most
of that will be on disk, unless your data is very small.
Future relases will include preferences support for these
type of things. So in case you are still confused, let me
spell it out for you. If you import 50M of raw audio into
AEdit, AEdit will create 75M of junk in your /tmp directory.
There was a trade off to be made, disk space or speed. I
picked speed. The nice part about this is that when you
save projects, everything is already on disk, so it just
renames the files. And when you load a project, it just maps
the files to it's internal structures.

Now that you have your data imported, you can select audio
by clicking and drag'in. You can then use the Edit menu to 
'Copy', 'Copy', and 'Paste'. To position a paste, single click 
where you want to insert the audio.
(Replace-paste is still in the works.)

On the 'View' menu, there is zoom 'In', 'Out' and 'Range'.
Truth is, the hot keys Alt-i Alt-o and Alt-r are much
more useful. But watch out! Hot keys queue up!

On the bottom, there are buttons. 'Play', 'Rec', and 'Stop'
should be easy to spot. The '+' is zoom in. The '-' is
zoom out, and the '=' is zoom range. You can hold in '+'
or '-' to do a cool zoom (or hold down the menu hot-keys).
(Record was left out of this relase, but will be in the
next release.)

The last two are play range, and loop range.
sorry, it's the best I could come up with :)

Above the buttons is a scroll bar, and on the right is a
'zoom bar'. The zoom bar doesn't have too much resolution,
so use it to get to the right order of magnitude, then
zoom in and out from there.

The 'Display' menu lets you pick what to see. Either
only the left channel, only the right channel, both
left and right side by side, or on top of each other.
Right is red, left is blue.

The 'Filter' menu is a place holder for things to come.
It will eventually contain a list of plug-ins.  

The 'Help' menu only contains one working option,
'About', and it does what you'd think. This menu
will eventually let you bring up an On-line
documention system. Currently if you try using
'Help', it will launch a web browser and open
this file.


Major things to come:
--------------------

0.65B/Alpha 3:   (Late Jan 1998)
-------------
Fixes to Cut, Copy, and Paste.
HTML replacing this file.
Some basic gui fixes. 

0.70B/Beta 1:    (Feb 1998)
-----------
Get Record to work. 
Move disk access to a different thread.
Paste-replace.

0.75B/Beta 2:    (May 1998)
------------
Sample Format Support for 8 and 24 bit.
Sample Rate Support (other than 44100).
Preferences.

0.80B/Beta 3:    (Aug 1998)
------------
Datatypes support.
Multi-track support.
Filters.

0.90B/PR 1:      (Nov 1998)
----------
Plug-in api for filters.
A real, on-line, users guide.
Multi-Window/Project Support.

1.00B/PR 2:      (?)
----------
Fancy hardware support such as ADAT, and AES. (via BeOS, not PCI I hope!)

1.00B/R 1:       (Jan 1999)
---------
Optimize! (but hold binary size under 200K!) (1.0)


Changes From Release 0.5B:
-------------------------
Play/Stop is much more stable.
Drag-and-Drop works sometimes.
Timeline works, and should not be cluttered.
PlayLoop works, but isn't perfect.
Saving and loading projects works most of the time.
Infinite data size supported, but a bit clunky sometimes.
Support for different display types.

Known Bugs:
----------
If you have a very large file open, and your zoomed in
all the way, and then pan using the scroll bar, the
program may freak out. (Actually, I think it's the
OS, but can't pin it down.) If this happens, just
try and wait out the disk swapping, then open
a shell and kill the main thread.

Sometimes, even if you never load anything, and
you mess with the window a bit, then quit, one
of the audio threads will hang up the audio server,
and you'll have to reboot if you want anything
to work right. (Might be an OS thing as well...)

Cut, Copy, and Paste don't always work correctly
on large files, or when you do a 'copy','paste','paste',
'paste','paste','paste'. Expect a release to fix
this as soon I have time to figure it out.

