[linux-audio-announce] [ANN] Traverso, a multitrack audio recording, editing and mixing program for GNU/Linux

[Remon Sijrier]

The Traverso Team is happy to announce the release of Traverso 0.30.0, a GPL 
licensed multitrack audio recording and editing program for GNU/Linux.
This release is the first in a series towards the final 1.0.0 release.


Traverso offers an innovative User Interface concept, with which it tries to 
differ from other multitrack audio applications and, more importantly, 
provides a powerfull tool to easy and quickly record or import, edit and mix 
songs.


Website addresses:

The source, distribution packages (Debian, Gentoo), or ready to run binaries 
can be obtained from the Project's website which is hosted on Savannah:

Project central development webpage:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/traverso/

Download link:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/files/?group=traverso


User Interface concept:

Traverso uses a contextual interaction interface.

Instead of using (only) the mouse to operate on certain objects, the mouse and 
keyboard are used together to control the program.

This results in a higher flexibility to controll the program compared to the 2 
or 3 mouse buttons available if the mouse was used alone. The mouse only has 
to move on an object and all functions become available by pressing a key on 
the keyboard. This is more efficient and requires less interaction than 
selecting the object and choosing the function from a menu. Since the object 
under the mouse cursor is automatically selected, this concept is 
called "soft selection".
It differs also from the more generally known "key shortcuts" which do not 
operate in a context, or only on "hard selected" objects.

To help new users to learn this way of controlling an application, Traverso 
offers "Contextual Menus", a detailed help file, and a tutorial on the web 
site.


Internals:

Traverso is a native Qt program which uses the new Qt 4.1 toolkit. This makes 
it a lightweight, fast program which is light on system resources. It uses 
the highly popular libsoundfile and libsamplerate libraries to read/write 
from/to audio files. Both audio file reads and writes are done with use of 
lockless ringbuffers to improve real time audio processing behaviour. Both 
ALSA (native) and Jack are supported, and great care is taken to make the 
internal sound processing routines Real Time friendly. The audio processing 
is done with normalized 32 bit floats. See the Changelog for more details.


Where to place Traverso:

The goal of Traverso is to create an easy, fast to controll and workflow based 
audio recording and editing application, and certainly isn't supposed to be a 
second Ardour/Audacity/other !

The interface concept, though not completely unknown, has been taken to a 
higher level than most applications have done, and as such is an experiment 
which so far has seen good results!

Traverso still lacks a number of features, however major components have been 
created including un/redo framework, a 100% seperation of Core and GUI, and 
reasonable solid playback/recording routines, either using native ALSA or 
Jack which can be switched at runtime.


History:

Traverso is a fork of the Protux project, and continued on the code base as of 
September 2005.


We hope Traverso will be of any use for you, and we encourage you to use it. 
We would be very pleased if you give your valuable feedback, so we can make 
Traverso better than we ever have hoped it would be!


The Traverso Team.