CLAM becomes public

The AGNULA IST project [www-Agnula, ] started in April 2002 and represented a major contribution for the growth of the CLAM framework. This European ``accompanying measure'' aimed at providing two distributions of GNU/Linux focused on Audio and Multimedia. One distribution was to be based on Debian and called Demudi and the other based on RedHat and named Rehmudi. Both versions would be entirely made from Free Software (Free as defined by the Free Software Foundation [Free Software Foundation, ]). CLAM was the main contribution by the Music Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University.

The inclusion of CLAM in such a project brought big and immediate changes into the general conception and philosophy of the framework. The most important change was that a framework that was being designed as an internal tool was to become public and accessible. This would introduce major changes into the development process that would also benefit internal users. Furthermore, CLAM was not only going to become public but also Free and distributed under the GPL license. And finally, although the initial targeted user was exclusively the researcher that needed to test/implement research algorithms now we had to also take into account the regular developer that chose our framework for simply developing and audio or music applications or even the user that was interested in working with one of the sample applications.

The first ``public'' release (Release 0.3) was published in April 2002. This release was published on the website [www-CLAM, ] but was not publicly announced. It was used to test all the different mechanisms related to the public release and to beta-test the framework itself. A mirror of the internal CVS repository was made, and public access, with no commit rights, was granted. The release was tested by internal users and by students with no experience that were exposed to the framework and asked to develop a basic spectral analysis/synthesis application.

CLAM was indeed first publicly presented at the 2002 Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA '02). CLAM was presented both as a poster and a demonstration [Amatriain et al., 2002c,Amatriain et al., 2002a]. For this event different concepts were clarified and discussed but most importantly the sample applications were brought to a more stable stage. We demonstrated SMSTools, SALTO and SpectralDelay (see 3.2.3 for details on these applications).

After this presentation the first formal beta release (release 0.4) was publicly announced in the context of the AGNULA project. This release included, in relation to the previous, many bugfixes, a much better and larger documentation and a new directory structure for the code. The examples demonstrated at the OOPSLA conference were also integrated into the public release.

The following minor releases introduced many other issues as the testing infrastructure using the cppunit framework. But most efforts were put into the SMSTools application, which was then called AnalysisSynthesisExample, in order to bring it to a usable stage. Because of this enhancements were pushed forward in the Processing repository (i.e. including new transformations based on the SMS algorithm) or the XML and Visualization infrastructure. The build system was also enhanced during this release.