Howdy! Vacation time is now gone and the rentrée is upon us, at least on this hemisphere side of the globe ;) Silly season, beloved August, summertime it is. And before it's too late, I'm proud to announce that a new alpha has summoned to the challenge:

Qtractor 0.2.1 (fainty diva) has been released!

Release highlights:

• Gradient eye-candy (NEW)
• DSSI multi-instance plug-in issue fixed
• Clip waveform/piano-roll rendered while recording (NEW)
• MIDI pitch-bend, omni-channel filtering and recording fixes
• Play-head positioning in the thumb-view (NEW)
• And many few more (see change-log below:)

Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 framework [1]. Target platform is Linux, where the a Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio [2] and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI [3] are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

Qtractor is free open-source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) [15].

Thanks to Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas and Guido Scholz, this Qsynth release is now a reality. Main new features are the new rotating knob style options, first full translations, German and Spanish and last but not least, there's this Windows^TM all-in-one package available (includes FluidSynth port) for your (sick:) pleasure only. Please read below the brilliant notes from Pedro about this breakthrouth release. Yes, before's too late:

Qsynth 0.3.3 (stable) is out!

For the clueless, Qsynth is a Qt GUI frontend application to the excellent FluidSynth soft-synth library implementation for the SoundFont 2 specification.

I am pleased to announce this new and long due release of QjackCtl, the Qt GUI for the awesome JACK Audio Connection Kit.

Release highlights are mainly about final JACK-MIDI support for the "evil" Patchbay, new Messages file logging and the most intriguing application window instance uniqueness which will make X11 desktop life easier for everyone (ie. no more duplicates as JACK server gets auto-started as candy bonus:)

After another quarantine period, I am pleased to announce (yet) another maintenance release of my flag-ship toy, Qtractor, an Audio/MIDI multi-track "bedroom" sequencer for the techno-boy and girl. Probably, the major feature highlight for this release, is the new optional support for in-place audio clip pitch-shifting through Chris Cannam's Rubber Band audio time stretcher. This one alone just closes the gap on the techno-boy/girl bedroom-studio prospects, so let's move along, nothing really new to see here :) However, given there were many inner changes in the audio rendering engine everything might just sound a lot less glitchy than previous releases. Therefore, everybody is welcome to upgrade. And please, don't be shy ;)

Qtractor 0.1.3 (frugal damsel) has been released!

Season greetings. As (almost) everybody knows already, or ought to, Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application, written in C++ on the Qt4 framework and Linux is about its native platform. Thus, JACK and ALSA are the main infrastructures that fit to purpose, respectively for audio and MIDI.

Also a known fact is that this is nothing more than my pet, hobby, spare-time-burner, whatever project, but... it's actually my own dogfood where digital music making and (re)creation matters. Yep. I still have this sublime hope to make it evolve as a fairly featured Desktop Audio/MIDI Workstation, one special and dedicated to the personal home­studio. As joked many times before, it's perfectly tagged for the techno-boy bedroom home-studio, but techno-girls can also apply ;). You tell me.

Qtractor 0.1.2 (frantic dame) is out!

As obvious as in any respectable easter egg ;)

Simon W. Fielding writes that after quite some time, and reading between the lines of various posts on the linuxaudio-user mail list, he has finally understood how the QjackCtl Patchbay works and what it is for. Because of that, he has written a brief guide to using the patchbay and the document is here first released into the wild, hoping it will turn out to be useful to someone in the quest to make amusing noises at home.

Thanks Simon, for this excellent piece of work. You've done, in just a few paragraphs, what I've failed to do in all those four years QjackCtl's Patchbay has been around ;) Cheers.

After landing almost literally at my day-job work place, I still didn't had much time for a reflection on what happened during this last days, on my now already traditional trip to the international Linux Audio Conference. This years edition took the KHM-Köln as a venue and, well, I'm back safe and sound. But sad already, somewhat. Suffice to tell that I do really enjoy being there and I really wish it could take much longer, or at least until one's missing home and warm family touch doesn't get in the way of insanity nor terribly overwhelming.

After some time in quarantine, meaning that it just passed almost 40 days since its last public appearance, the frivolous debutante has matured a bit but not that much. Truth is, it is not quite healed and in fact, it is getting seriously bloated ;)

Qtractor 0.1.1 (futile duchess) has been released!

Pawel Wolniewicz got me to know about one short tutorial on Qtractor, that was just made available here:

How to record a multitrack song using Qtractor.

Free-Your-Media is a weblog on open source multimedia technologies, developed for the purpose of: graphics design, web development, video editing, audio software, open source games, Creative Commons, Linux... please share the word. Many thanks for a great job, Pawel.