rncbc's blog

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!

So I lied, bluffed all the way, so what? What you'd expect from this one self-called über-procrastinator ? And then there's hope. Alas, not the messiah, rather my development drive at my own pace. Believe it or not, it is on-going and it will sure happen real soon ;)

No sweat. The whole automation prophecy will be realized and delivered. Yes, TYOQA (The Year Of Qtractor Automation:) just failed, slipped a bit. It doesn't mean it was abandoned or, uh, procrastinated... well, it's only a Happy New Year after all :)

The road to automation is already being paved and walked although, I must say, it is no yellow-bricked one. The drive has begun. Definitely, 2011 will be TYOQA (aha, read that again with a bold tee:)! More than automation, which infrastructure is already lurking in there, trust me, all work is being carried out at the backyard for the time being.
Blossoms might just pop out this Spring ;)

One thing I may wish to leave sound and clear: it is very likely that, in the very near future, that there will be some dot-release before the all-mighty-one release, whatever. Now that the surprise-effect is gone, the long overdue and hailed beta release cycle that will present you and carve its deeds on stone with the dynamic-curves and automation features et al., will be nothing less nor before the coming version numbered as the 0.5.x scheme. Then, and only then, the current alpha-cycle will be concluded. Of course, that will be also the time for translations to be called in. Just be a little more patient :)

And then I lied a second time, when said those parodied F&D release code-names were exhausted. Thanks to a lengthy but intermittent Fall/Winter-of-coding period, I had the chance to wake up one morning with the imagination score in its lowest end and roar an inner WTH! As they say around here, there's no second without a third. So another lie is there waiting to be told. Or is it not? There, one would say: time will tell...

Nuff said.

Release highlights:

• Archive/Zip session file bundle (save as... .qtz suffix) (NEW)
• Mixer MIDI controller mapping/learn (NEW)
• LV2 GTK UI support (NEW)
• LV2 Persist extension support (NEW)
• MIDI Tools on main track/clips view(NEW)
• Floating tool-tips while dragging/moving/pasting (NEW)
• Rescale and Timeshift MIDI tools (NEW)
• MIDI Quantize percentage (NEW)
• Track range selection (NEW)
• Audio insert send, wet/dry controls (NEW)
• Audio clip pitch-shifting (FIX)
• Metronome dedicated outputs related crash (FIX)
• Stop transport tool/button action (NEW)
• Mouse-wheel zooming (NEW)

and a few more assorted features and fixes--see below the complete (boring) change-log for gruesome details.

You can also

JACK Session managerism. This might well be ahead of its time. And probably is. JACK session infrastructure and its promised functionality is still dormant in subversion source pits. However, good news are, no matter which flavor you pick, either JACK1 (>= 0.119.2) or JACK2 (>= 1.9.7), both already do it all to the promise. However still on their respective SVN trunks though.

Maybe this very announcement will get that all loose and out of the dorm ;) At least, I'm trying.

Meanwhile and until that ever happen, QjackCtl will be already here even though its JACK Session manager(istic) features will be just lurking to get out of redundancy. Fact is, this new source won't do much better than that of good old Patchbay, if compiled with existing JACK package distributions (latest are 0.118.0 and 1.9.6, respectively) . Nor even close. Actually, only when it gets ever compiled and built against a current JACK Session API it will take off. Fly high or low, you may ask. Well, may I say, it will only fly as high as many Linux audio application developers will do to embrace the daunting trouble of adding a few dozen lines of source code to their creatures. And to their help, chances are that Torben Hohn already has all the starters ready (ask torbenh on #jack @ irc.freenode.net; maybe he still has some fresh git repo/patch on the fridge:). Then again, this very announcement is being kind of a heads-up. Avast ye LADs!

Anyway, there are a few new tricks this old dog have been taught, besides putting the carriage before the horses, nevertheless... :)

That's it. Well, the uber-procrastinator sometimes gets over it. Sometimes :) Maybe there's a fine distinction between elegant procrastination and being just lazy. Tradition still rules: lazy enough to procrastinate no more :)

Aha, don't forget, you still can ;)

It's TYOQA (The Year Of Qtractor Automation:) what else? But wait, there's still three months to go... Meanwhile the foundations have already been laid and one can now tell that a rocky milestone is ready to get bumped. Ouch!

Release highlights:

• MIDI learn/controller mapping for all plugin parameters (NEW)
• Extended Clip fade-in/out WYSIWYG curves (NEW)
• MIDI resolution overflow (FIX)
• MIDI tempo standard base on quarter-note (FIX)
• Extended MIDI controller mapping for mixer/tracks (NEW)
• Audio metronome gain control (NEW)
• Mute/solo tracks while looping (FIX)
• MIDI Clock support (NEW)
• Audio clip import while looping (FIX)
• MIDI track bank-select/program-change transparency (FIX)
• VeSTige headers included for native VST plugin support (NEW)
• JACK transport sync support (FIX)
• Clip tempo-adjust tool (NEW)
• Audio tracks auto-monitoring (FIX)
• Transport back/forward stops on loop points (NEW)
• MIDI tracks redundant mute/solo (FIX)