The Tenth Commencement

Once again there comes the time when I figure out that yet another month has gone through since the last one of those so called pre-releases, the kind I name this sort of alpha sneak-previews of crappy-buggy software. But that's just me ;) Sometimes, when you just know about too much too well the gears and stuff of something ingenious, you get that strange feeling of somewhat shallow confidence, to say the least. Hey! Am I under some kind of depression or what? My own answer is what :)

Right. Back to the subject at hand, after some fixing and some other shy features getting in place, with the obligatory new and older bugs still lurking around, let's get the deeds going and have it in another go :). Business as usual, they say.

Cut the fanfare,

Qtractor 0.0.6.728 (Tenth Commencement) pre-released!

Check it out from the official sites:

http://qtractor.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor

and mind you for having a word or two heard upstream?

http://www.rncbc.org

There you are ;)

The complete, utterly boring but mandatory change-log will follow:

• A bit more of precision is achieved over the metronome regular ticking and both the audio and MIDI monitor meters.
• A rudimentary MIDI metronome is now in place; parameters, like MIDI channel, bar and beat accent note, velocity and duration, are readily configurable from the main menu, View/Options.../MIDI/Metronome dialog.
• Track properties dialog now gets tightly auto-sized, depending whether its an audio or a MIDI track.
• MIDI clips are now auto-extendable when adding or moving events beyond the clip length and while in the MIDI Editor, of course.
• MIDI editor current selection can now be step-wise moved using the keyboard arrow keys and the enter/insert keys as for final placement; horizontal step movement is subordinated to current snap per beat setting, no less than unity; vertical step moves are obviously quantized to the next semitone.
• Get configure to try and detect the correct qmake location and insert it the search order, so let the qt4 tools take precedence when --with-qt option is given and older qt3 ones coexist and are found located ahead in the PATH.
• Drifting correction on audio and MIDI engines was seriously infected in some kind of snafu conception, as evidence lead to even worse drifting being detected to much of great despair, specially after recording and/or bouncing audio tracks from MIDI sequenced material. Credit must certainly go to Christian Schoenebeck on splatting this sloppy one on the face.
• MIDI editing actions while playing now get immediate feedback; this was possible to some internal interface redesign of all MIDI editor accessory classes, making the MIDI clip now being the main editing target object instead of just the MIDI event sequence as it was previously.
• Simple as it could ever be, the build executive summary report is now given on configure.
• The internal decoded frame list for MPEG 1Audio Layer III (mp3) audio files (ie. via libmad) has been made one-time cached as global shared objects, benefitting from the fact that the list is always completely (re)built during the peak file computation, and thus speeding up all frame accurate access operations (seek) over this specific audio file format.
• More eye-candy is sneaking in the MIDI editor: there's new view options on the View menu: Note Color and Value Color, affecting note event colors according to pitch and/or velocity.
• New view option on the MIDI editor: on menu View/Note Duration switches whether events are shown proportional to their durations or as simple vertical candlesticks.
• New snap-per-beat divisors are now available (Beat/3, 6, 12, 24 and 48), giving support for triplets for the very first time (after a heads-up suggested patch from Marko, thanks).

Cheers && Enjoy.
--
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela