rncbc's blog

Howdy! JACK Session versioning is quite simply the most interesting new feature for this release. It's optional but enabled by default. One can just turn it off and keep the bad old take-no-prisoneers behavior :)

Never is too late,

Enjoy, and

On the verge of the summer solstice (read astronomical years middle point) and after years in the making (read procrastination), track automation or dynamic curves, as some like to call, is finally a reality, tricky though but real nevertheless. The very first milestone has been bumped over already and is publicly available for the brave to experiment. All in the latest & greatest subversion trunk, of course.

Yess. This is one hopeful attempt to be the very last one before officially entering the TYOQA age. Mainly a big fix and optimization release. Yes, you've read that right. Big. Some earthquake-bound changes have sneaked in and all under the hood. Most are bearable visible, if at all. Quite frankly, the most time-critical code paths have been subject to some kind of a deep overhaul, and to say the very least, might get only noticeable while loading hugely complex sessions. Whatever that means. In other words and put simply, there are gentle performance wins and nice resource savings.

Anyway, there's no breakage regarding the past. Everything should work smooth as ever. Nevertheless, there's a good chance it might enter beta phase or whatever you wish to call it. I guess most people had ditched any serious assessment on this piece of software just because I've been sticking with an infamous alpha label for so long. Well, in my own opinion (what else?), if you care, it's just that. All software is always either in that so-called alpha or omega--there's no middle term, all else is marketing gibberish--all software is more or less in a broken state (ie. alpha) or just simply dead and gone (omega). There you have it :)

With nothing else to say (and then time being the worst of enemies),

Release highlights:

• MIDI scale-quantize and snap-to-scale tools (NEW)
• Audio recording latency compensation (NEW)
• Mute/un-solo tracks shading (NEW)
• MIDI controller invert value and connects access (NEW)
• Tempo map dialog tap helper (NEW)
• Audio peak/waveform generation pipeline (NEW)
• Track-view clip invert selection (NEW)
• MIDI clip editor range selection (NEW)
• Major audio clip buffering/streaming thread optimization (FIX)
• Temporary JACK session extract directory (FIX)
• Red shade recording display (NEW) and looping (FIX)
• Audio clip over-extended ghost-playback (FIX)
• MIDI tempo map resolution import (FIX)
• Audio/MIDI time drift correction (FIX)
• Changed bus connections preservation (FIX)
• Simultaneous multi-track recording result extents (FIX)
• Track-view selection and redrawing optimization (FIX)
• LV2 instrument/synth on audio tracks crash (FIX)

Real juice follows, below...

It's all gone by now. Another year, yet another LAC is now accomplished. For the first time ever, it took place on a officially English-speaking country besides the native Gaelic/Irish alternative. The Linux Audio Conference 2011, just ran out at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Music Department, Maynooth, on May 6-8 2011 for the record.

Ephemerally, it also marked the 9th edition of the meeting. A very happy anniversary to the LAD's! On my shift, it was just the 7th time in a row and sure am happy as well. I'm humble enough to tell that this year everything went so smooth that I'm really having a hard time finding a good incidental spot to blog about. Alas, it's all gone now, business as usual, I should tell.

Season greetings! It's spring-cleaning time once again. Dust has severely piled up and brand old mite is already lurking around. That's the bad news. Good news are there are plans for this FluidSynth gooey front-end, you know it's about Qsynth. Alas, plans are follow today's slip release though.

Finally, you may say. Not that there's any big (not even small) new features being slung out today. In fact, there's just a lousy couple of the same old crap. Never mind. Big plans are all about getting some channel controllers--also known as generators--into the picture. Yes, finally. It means amplitude, filter envelope generators, LFO modulators, knobs and sliders gore fest and what not. I hear you thinking that's all what a synth is about. And you're damn right. Dropping an initial, synth has been in the name all this time hasn't it? Right, it has been a pretty old plan, ever since early dawn. Well, it still is... a plan.

As always, I won't make any promises, which would be a terrible thing to do, specially from one who keeps calling himself the über-procrastinator. Yeah, I'm sure you know me from previous auto-proclamations. Back to subject at hand, there it is.

Qsynth 0.3.6 slipped away from the dust!