Kwave

Kwave is an open source and completely free graphical software project implemented in C++/Qt, designed for the KDE desktop environment, and aimed at people who are looking for a modern, intuitive, feature rich and easy-to-use sound editor.

Features at a glance

Key features include an attractive graphical user interface (GUI) designed especially for the KDE4 desktop environment, support for 24-bit audio, undo and redo support, simple drag & drop support, real time pre-listen for various effects, as well as support for multi-track files.

Additionally, the application features complete scroll and zoom functionality, support for recording via OSS and ALSA sound servers, loading and editing of large files, reading and auto-repair of damaged WAV files, support for multiple windows, and a powerful plugin architecture.

Includes a wide range of plugins

In addition to the above features, Kwave includes a wide range of plugins that will greatly enhance your sound editing experience. Among these, we can mention amplify free, fade in, fade out, lowpass filter, notch filter, pitch shift, playback, recording, silence, sonagram, volume, select range, and noise.

The software is capable of importing and exportingall file types supported by the libaudiofile project, lets users to import MP3 audio files through the id3lib and libmad programs, allows importing and exporting of Ogg Vorbis audio files, as well as of FLAC sound files.

Under the hood and availability

Taking a look under the hood of the Kwave program, we can notice that is has been written entirely in the C++ programming language, and the cross-platform Qt GUI toolkit is used for its beautiful and modern graphical user interface.

The software is available for download as a source package, as well as binary for the Gentoo Linux operating system. It can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution and supports both 32 and 64-bit computer platforms.

What is new in this release:

• ported to KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) / Qt5
• playback via Qt Multimedia
• bugfix: saved plugin parameter lists with escaped characters were not unescaped when loading again
• compile fix for armv7l
• codec_mp3: added missing "help" button to encoder setup dialog
• fixed invocation of file dialog, as suggested by EBN
• support for cmake > 3.3, fix for policy CMP0063
• cmdline option "--nofork" no longer exists
• bugfix: multiple issues in context of switching the GUI type in scripts
• bugfix: fixed issues in saveblocks plugin with special characters in filenames and patterns, format strings of second and later invocations of patterns were ignored
• saveblocks: allow path separators in filename patterns to make it possible to create subdirectories
• saveblocks: added patterns to include file info (file meta data) or the title of the current block
• workaround for bug in KDE #345320 (missing translators in help/about dialog)
• about plugin: added info about translation team
• added screenshot of the edit_label dialog
• bugfix: tooltips of the fileinfo dialog were not translated
• new make target: "make msgstats" to show the progress of translations
• compile fix for armv7l
• playback: dropped Phonon support (was broken and no longer supported by KF5)
• bugfix: hourglass cursor was not taken back in playback setup dialog
• RPM: format of changelog has changed
• changed plugin install directory and prefix/suffix
• curve widget: use same colors as in frequency response widget, for better readability on bright color themes

What is new in version 0.9.0:

• first version hosted on KDE (kdereview) and SourceForge
• added command line parameter for selecting the GUI type
• in MDI mode: new menu entry + function to arrange sub windows vertically
• handbook: added text command reference
• handbook: added plugin reference
• enabled the "Help" buttons of all plugins and let them open the corresponding section in the handbook
• make system: new target "update-handbook" (updates command, file info and plugin cross references)
• make system: fixed dependency problem in translation
• new commands: "window:sendkey", "window:screenshot", "window:close" and "window:resize"
• built-in variable ${LANG} for kwave commands
• support for delayed command execution
• debug plugin: always compiled in, but only visible in debug build
• new command sync(): wait for commands scheduled with delayed
• bugfix: exporting a mono file as MP3 produced a stereo MP3 file
• MP3: emphasis, copyrighted, original got lost during save/load
• file info dialog: MPEG settings were not handled properly
• bugfix: assert/numeric overflow in selectnextlabels() at end of file
• new plugin: stringenter
• bugfix: minimized windows were not migrated properly when switching GUI type
• new command: window:minimize
• bugfix: missing range check in noise generator (when used per script)
• bugfix: saveblocks plugin did not work when omitting file extension
• saveblocks plugin: use escaped strings for storing settings instead of base64

What is new in version 0.8.99-2:

• bugfix: wrong sub window mode when switching to tab mode when having only one sub window (workaround for bug in Qt)
• bugfix: recording did not work in MDI and Tab mode (wrong file context)
• bugfix: fixed passing a text command as first command line parameter

What is new in version 0.8.11:

• Added spanish translation, provided by Carlos R.
• Bugfix: file names were not properly escaped in context of file/open,
• file/openrecent and drag&drop
• Bugfix: saveblocks() did not abort properly when pressing cancel
• Unclean shutdown of the file progress dialog when saving
• Noise plugin: add noise (mix) instead of overwrite, with adjustable
• level in percent or dB
• Pause button: change tooltip to "continue" if paused
• New command line option: "--disable-splashscreen"
• New command line option: "--iconic" to start minimized
• Fixed quoting errors in CMakeLists.txt (cmake-2.8.12 complained)
• Bugfix: ASCII encoder: escape special characters in meta data
• Implementation of ASCII import
• Memory settings: raised default memory limits
• Bugfix: crash in file info dialog / auto generate keywords
• MP3 plugin: use ID3 tag TSSE for software version
• ASCII codec: implemented support for labels

What is new in version 0.8.10:

• support for Ogg/Opus codec
• bugfix: unwanted termination if splash screen closed while the first
• toplevel widget still was starting up
• improved auto detect of svg-to-png conversion,
• added support for "rsvg-convert" (SF bug #38)
• increased default memory sizes
• some GUI improvements

What is new in version 0.8.9:

• new feature: MP3 export via external program "lame", "toolame" and "twolame", with configurable command line options
• new feature: allow change of compression type via file info
• fix for SF #3528848, removed -Wl,--add-needed from plugin LINK_FLAGS
• speedup: improved performance of sample writer
• wav import/export: support for some more meta data tags
• bugfix: meta data lost when writing wav files that had meta data for product/album or subject/track at the same time
• bugfix: broken signal/slot connection in SaveBlocks plugin
• workaround for bug in id3lib, SF #3534143: ignore id3lib crc check result for MPEG Layer II files
• bugfix: Gentoo ebuild lacked required svg use flag for media-gfx/imagemagick and media-gfx/graphicsmagick
• bugfix: File/SaveAs now uses last recently used directory and extension together with the user defined file name
• bugfix: PluginManager::sync caused application slowdown or stale GUI

What is new in version 0.8.7:

• ebuild update for media-gfx/imagemagick media-gfx/graphicsmagick (see gentoo bug #314325)
• new feature: "insert at", paste clipboard at given position
• fix for API change in libaudiofile v0.3.1
• speedup: loading ogg/mp3 is much faster now (up to factor 2)
• bugfix: stream name of pulse audio playback used wrong encoding
• update of the Kwave spec file (synced with OpenSuSE build service version)
• new build target "distfiles"
• updated version of the GPL v2 document (GNU-LICENSE)
• support for visualization plugins

What is new in version 0.8.5:

• new feature: playback via PulseAudio
• applied kwave-0.8.2-nolinguas.patch (see gentoo bug #267702)
• support for the Gentoo build system that steals .po files
• no longer default to english language for documentation and gui l10n
• fixed use count mismatch of plugins
• bugfix: playback control: continuing after pause continued from start
• bugfix: G.711 encoded wav files support only 16 bit signed format
• new assignment for mouse wheel:
• without modifier key: scroll left/right
• with Shift: page left/right
• with Ctrl: zoom in/out
• with Alt: vertical zoom in/out
• bugfix: support sysinfo.mem_unit when >= 4GB RAM are installed
• bugfix: crash in progress dialog handling (crashed when closing a plugin after finishing it's work)
• new ebuild for Gentoo

What is new in version 0.8.4:

• new feature: support for primitive macros (batch files), playback only
• new plugin: change sample rate
• using libsamplerate (new dependency)
• new feature: sample rate conversion on clipboard data
• new feature: abillity to set recording start time in advance
• (feature requested by John David Thompson)
• bugfix: drag&drop of files on the main window was broken
• workaround for bug in id3lib which crashed in ID3_Tag::GetSize()
• with some MP3 files (see id3lib upstream bug at SF #2821464)
• bugfix: recording via ALSA, crash on snd_pcm_close(),
• see SF bug #2816544
• bugfix: playback plugin: infinite loop when switching from OSS to ALSA
• bugfix: forcing clipboard and drag&drop data to uncompressed mode
• bugfix: deadlock in progress bar handling
• bugfix: crash when unloading plugins with queued events
• help/about dialog: hide "translators" tab if no translator available
• help/about dialog: hack to allow web addresses of translators
• bugfix: selection was not set after "paste" and undo of other operations
• bugfix: label handling in context of "delete" and "undo" was broken
• bugfix: invalidation of overview cache after delete was not correct
• bugfix: artefacts in track display in min/max overview mode
• bugfix: add/delete/modify of labels did not set the state of the
• current file to "modified"
• bugfix: record dialog caused shutdown to hang when closed while recording
• bugfix: decoding 32bit/sample was broken
• bugfix: recording level meter consumed 100% cpu
• new make target: "make apidoc" for internal doxygen documentation
• bugfix: some images and icons in non-english documentation were missing
• volume plugin: preview was not updated on first use of plugin

What is new in version 0.8.3-2:

• bugfix: re-enabled detection of optimized memcpy function
• bugfix: deadlock in recording plugin and plugin management
• bugfix: ID3 tag import did not work
• taking ID3 tag for "album" as "product" in wav meta data
• taking ID3 tag for "track" as "subject" in wav meta data

What is new in version 0.8.3:

• integrated 05-do-not-install-so-symlinks.diff from Debian (thanks to Aurelien)
• cs i18n update from Pavel Fric
• new plugin: normalize
• progress bar in volume plugin did not work
• flattened "Fx" menu, no submenus for amplify and filter
• bugfix: workaround for libaudiofile bug produced wrong header in 24bit/sample mode
• bugfix: "fade outro" was broken
• bugfix: the dialog when playing the test sound in the playback setup dialog did not appear
• replaced qreal with double (fixes build problems on arm)
• show hourglass / progress bar when undo/redo is running
• flattened "Calculate" menu, no submenus for "Frequencies"
• wav encoder: auto-switch to unsigned format for 8 bit per sample
• volume plugin: show a little "preview" for guessing the level
• bugfix: after deleting a track, file info was not updated
• about plugin: separate tab for translators
• made plugin API version configurable per plugin
• recognize mime type "audio/x-vorbis+ogg" (found in KDE-4)
• updated czech gui translation and user manual from Pavel Fric
• bugfix: crashes when deleting objects that still have event queued with Qt::QueuedConnection -> now using Qt::BlockingQueuedConnection
• new plugin: reverse
• speedup: limiting the number of progress bar updates per second
• memory manager: fixed multithreading issues, improved OOM behaviour
• bugfix: received SIGBUS in SwapFile when disk was full
• improved performance of memory management
• require Qt4 v4.5.0 or newer

Requirements:

• KDE Plasma