Qtractor 0.5.4 - Echo Victor shouts out!

Howdy,

There's no victory over anything whatsoever. Read it again, it's just a codename. If that serves anything at all, to my own defense that is, Qtractor is still a pet project hobby of mine, as all things in Linux audio world for that matter.

There's been too many saying and comparing Ardour vs. Qtractor. I'm seeing if often said in too many sentences lately and, believe me, I cannot stand comfortable with that saying no more.

So here it goes: Ardour is a full fledged, pro-level DAW and, for crying out loud on its own, the flagship of the free/open-source pro-audio fleet and movement, not only Linux anymore nowadays. On the other hand, Qtractor is a sequencer (hinted by its own subtitle, in case you didn't notice) with a twist and a few of a DAW features. And it strictly runs on the Linux platform only and most important yet, it has been targeted to a (re)creational personal home-studio audience ever since.

Heard about the techno-boy bedroom (with a guitar) folk? Well, that's exactly what it is, from day zero. Hope you all get the picture ;)

Enough whining.

Release highlights:

• Panic command button (NEW)
• Improved audio/MIDI file resource management (NEW)
• MIDI SysEx for instrument plugins (NEW)
• MIDI Controller auto-hook option (NEW)
• MIDI Tools resize ramp (NEW)
• Revised plugin search directory paths (FIX)
• MIDI zero-duration note-on/off queuing (FIX)
• Audio linked-clips looping (FIX)

Website:

Project page:

Downloads:

• source tarball:
  qtractor-0.5.4.tar.gz
• source package (openSUSE 12.1):
  qtractor-0.5.4-3.rncbc.suse121.src.rpm
• binary packages (openSUSE 12.1):
  qtractor-0.5.4-3.rncbc.suse121.i586.rpm
  qtractor-0.5.4-3.rncbc.suse121.x86_64.rpm
• long time ago, far far away: user manual:
  qtractor-0.3.0-user-manual.pdf

Weblog (upstream support):

http://www.rncbc.org


License:

Qtractor is free, open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.


Change-log:

• Direct access plugin/insert parameter changing tool-tip added.
• A Transport/Panic action enters the scene, in a nostalgic attempt to emulate the all-MIDI-track-shut-off command of those drop-dead and primordial MIDI sequencers of all time. Now finally a keyboard shortcut and mouse click-away ;)
• MIDI editor command redo/undo adjustment now effective on all other channel events besides notes, which overlap at the same event time.
• A new File/Unlink menu action is now made available from the MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll) for detaching the current linked/ref-counted MIDI clip into a new auto-incremented SMF filename.
• Some audio/MIDI content/media-file resource management is entering the scene, taking care of some file-system house-keeping, this gets evident on unsaved/dead recorded files being automaticaly removed from the file-system, on session close.
• Killed the old and entirely deprecated LV2 Save/Restore and Persist feature/extensions support.
• Auto-monitored MIDI events are now merged/queued correctly into the instrument plugin playback queue, avoiding sudden crashes, hopefully.
• Awesome patch from Albert Graef, thanks, which makes most MIDI SysEx to get through MIDI instrument plugins at last; applies to DSSI and LV2 plugins only.
• LV2 URID map/unmap feature support added.
• Plugin parameter value redo/undo command aliasing fix.
• Double-clicking in plugin list item now show/activates the plugin's editor window (was toggling visibility/activation).
• Plugin path settings have been fixed again, with special regards to an effective LV2_PATH environment variable settlement.
• Session properties dialog now asks to create a new session directory if the given one does not currently exist.
• MIDI note names and their respective octave numbers are now compliant with the ISO standard where middle C (60) is now C4 (was C3).
• Fixed audible glitch/pop at the beginning of an audio clip with long quadratic or cubic shaped fade-in (reported by Lougi Verona, thanks).
• MIDI Controller Auto-Hook patch by Alessandro Preziosi, thanks.
• Make sure all MIDI note-off are always queued after their respective note-on events when buffering for MIDI input of instrument plugins, event though for zero duration MIDI note events (hopefully fixing the hanging notes bug #3476124, as reported by Albert Graef, thanks).
• LV2 MIDI-fx plugin support has been repaired.
• Single-track clip selection logic corrected again, fixing multi-clip selection drag/move across an odd number of distinct tracks (after a bug report by Louigi Verona, on linux-audio-dev, thanks).
• MMC Locate time-code hour bit-field fix; MMC Locate now also on loop turnarounds (patches by Albert Graef, thanks).
• Looping across multiple linked/ref-counted audio clips was incredibly broken with complete out-of-sync playback. Hopefully fixed now, with auto-unlinking/cloning all the affected audio clip buffers.
• Audio clip overlapping detection off-by-one(-frame) fix.
• MIDI Tools/Resize value ramp mode has been added (mocking the 'resize to range' feature request #3467894, by Daniel MacDonald aka. danboid).



Enjoy && Have fun!