As everything in life, all good and bad things go to an end. That is also the case with the 5th International Linux Audio Conference, which took place at the Technischen Universität Berlin, TU-Berlin for short, during the four whole days, March 22 through 25. It is now over and I am now back home safely.

That's it. I'm ready and so are Qtractor. Some late bugs have been fixed, others been slightly re-touched, but I guess it's all set for throwing this puppy into the beasts.

I think Qtractor has reached a fairly stable status, after some small changes and fixes. The major fix honorable enough to mention deals with MIDI track mute/solo switching. It is now working as expected, after lurking and annoyingly unfixed for quite some time. Disparate session sample-rates are also subject of a suggestive warning message and then tentatively converted.

This has been a great week. After a quick and brief brainstorming, I decided to implement some basic MIDI Machine Control (MMC) support into Qtractor. This covered the basic transport functions and, most notably, it changed the Rewind and Fast-Forward actions behavior, now resembling the tape-recorder paradigm. Or sort of.

Yesterday, a new blog article went online through Linux Journal. Shy as I'm used to, I can only think of blushing my face deep.

It is with the greatest joy that I'm bragging to the world my modest paper/demo submission to the coming LAC2007@TU-Berlin. The paper is already out for review through the proper channels.

As previously advertised, that's all about announcing Qtractor as a brand new contender in the free open-source software audio/MIDI arena and willing to recruit some folks in the process.

Here we are at the last days of 2006, making already wishes for another good year. On my side, there's sure plenty to do but so little spare time to make all those things real. At least before the year ends :)

Alright, there's one thing that I certainly must do this very week-end (and year-end too), and that will be like putting up some kind of demo/paper submission to the forthcoming LAC2007 5th International Linux Audio Conference which will take place during 22-25 March 2007 at TU-Berlin, Germany.

In a rogue attempt to fix and adapt to Qt 4.2, the track-list widget which is nothing more than the tabular widget at the main window left-pane, has been completely rewritten from scratch. It is now based on the custom scroll-view class, as all other scrollable widgets are, instead of being a natively bloated QTableView derivative. The fine print now says the track-list vs. track-view vertical scrolling is now back to pixel resolution and looks way better too.

But not so fast pal, there's some noticeable drawbacks lurking around and one is certain that quite evident as sessions now load faster :)

It was just yesterday when I've upgraded my laptop to openSUSE 10.2, which went fine by the way. Trouble is, it comes with Qt 4.2.1 and with fingers-crossed I let Qtractor run and/or build for the very first time on that -- as a sidenote, the recent migration went trough Qt 4.1 which was bundled in openSUSE 10.1. The fine print says now that Qtractor works in general on the the new Qt line, but there's a serious issue between the track-list item heights and respective vertical scroll synchronization with the track-view pane, that is the main view in fact :) Good grief, I have to spend some more time digging the QTableView class et al.

Just in time for the Halloween season and without disguise, Qtractor migration to Qt4 is now complete and committed to CVS. The migration process spanned over three precise weeks as one can certainly confirm from the previous posts in this blog.

It was kind of boresome, but it is now done. In fact I can tell that the new Qt4 codebase is almost a complete rewrite from the old Qt3 one. To be fair, almost half of the current 50.000 C++ source-code lines were (re)touched in some way or another, but the core functionality remained fundamentally the same, with some scattered improvements I must say.