The Adolescence Prime

Before getting into great details, a new alpha-release got its heads up:

Qtractor 0.0.9.778 (adolescence prime) is out!

This probably marks a subtle but important milestone in the project life-cycle, if it has any. Yes, Qtractor aims to be a fairly featured Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer for the Linux GUI desktop, with the personal home-studio in mind. Although still in a so called alpha phase of software development, it is known to be already functional and productive, at least for me ;)

But why do I call this particular pre-release a milestone? Because, I believe, that these following weeks will see some rather and invasive changes to highly sensitive and internal workings, specially regarding audio sequencing. Short reason: changes might break the hell apart. Long reason: in-place audio clip time-stretching is about to get integrated. That's it.

Without further delay, everyone is welcome to grab the source and also some binary packages, available from the official project site:

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

The pertinent change-log follows:

• Drag-and-dropping of MIDI files without specific track or channel,
  into existing tracks, is now rejected. The drop operation is now
  allowed on the track-view blank area only, meaning the same as the
  complete MIDI file import into session.
• Record actual MIDI clip length to last play-head position,
  instead of time of last event in the recorded sequence.
• Connections item lists gets properly sorted, as intended.
• Clear connection persistance once an explicit discconnection is
  issued on any of the (intrinsic) bus ports.
• MIDI output buses now get the panning slider to spit out some
  GM system master balance (sysex) messages, being now enabled.
• Mouse hovering on the clip fade-in/out handles, while in the
  main track-view, gets its long due cursor pointer feedback.
• Fixed a off-by-one boundary issue on MIDI clip event playback,
  which were enqueuing duplicated MIDI events on every read-ahead
  output thread processing cycle (1 sec).
• Transport menu and toolbar are now featured on the MIDI Editor.
• Use actual session name when asking to save changed session.
• Transport loop setting keyboard shortcuts swapped: Ctrl+L will
  set the loop immediately, and Shift+Ctrl+L will toggle on/off.
• Changing MIDI event duration may now affect MIDI clip duration.
• Alternate sharp-note color lines have returned to MIDI Editor
  canvas, as was the shadow color marking the end of MIDI clip.

Have a great time.

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