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Even though the Iceland volcanic ash plumes are still messing up the air, I decided to do some spring cleaning after all and started with what's laying around here, collecting dust. Bad timing or not, it's now or never. Über-procrastinator dixit.

Remember that piece of junk that I rig on every desktop which still has some PCI card slots anyway? If you don't, I'll tell you once more: the Yamaha DB50XG piggyback. I know it's not easy to find those nowadays, but there's always that auction sites for you to try. Moreover the hosting sound-cards which exposes a Creative Labs Waveblaster daughter-board expansion port, are no easier too. Ah, the good old nineties...

Never mind, so here it goes again:

QXGEdit 0.1.0 has fallen from the attic!

This stands as the second public release and who knows what next spring cleaning will bring ;)

Awe! Times they are a-changing although Bob Dylan has no D-Business here. The old and cutie gooey for JACK just got one turn around the verge of bit-rotting. This time it brings full JACK D-Bus support, or almost. It also adds D-Bus access for most GUI actions which some might find pretty handy for keyboard shortcut binding from your desktop environment of choice. However, if babies health is your top concern you can just turn this D-Bus thing off and play with the Old times ;) Ahem...

More details in the change-log, below.

QmidiCtl is a MIDI remote controller application that sends MIDI data over the network, using UDP/IP multi-cast. It has been designed primarily for the Maemo enabled handheld devices, namely the Nokia N900. In its current development state, which is obviously alpha as of this writing, it puts a mini multi-track recording control surface on your hands and on the go, so to speak. MMC is the feature and yours truly Qtractor the target. However, any other MMC enabled DAW may be considered.

However nothing of this would be possible without this little thing that gets also here its release announcement: QmidiNet is a MIDI network gateway application that sends and receives MIDI data (ALSA Sequencer) over the network, using UDP/IP multi-cast. Fundamentally inspired by multimidicast and designed to be compatible with ipMIDI for Windows, it's a little tiny application that sits as an icon on your system tray and exposes one or more ALSA Sequencer client ports which open the way for a MIDI network mesh. Pretty neat if you think wireless and not necessarily because of QmidiCtl.

Alas, you can transform any Linux/ALSA computer (or Windows/ipMIDI enabled one, if you dare to) into a MIDI-over-IP inter-connected node.

Be free, without cables :)

Some might like to know that free-hand drawing is now featured on the MIDI clip editor (aka piano-roll). It's one click away from the Edit/Select Mode/Edit On menu or the pencil tool-button.

Speaking of overdue TODO lines, another one bites the dust. On SVN trunk (qtractor-0.4.5.1516+) of course.

Oh Sunday, boring Sunday... :o) Well, swing-quantize has just sneaked in the SVN trunk (qtractor-0.4.5.1502+). You can bear this from MIDI clip editor's (aka piano-roll) Tools/Quantize... menu.

Basically, the way I've implemented it, is kind of a deformed grid quantization, which distorts even numbered (beat, quarter-note, seminima, whatever) divisions by a given percentage, something that can pictured as follows....