# FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 13th, 2011 - The metronome swings back. Renoise 2.7 transitions from the developer-heavy focus of the previous release to more musical concerns such as Sampling, Instruments, Automation, and Native DSPs.
As part of a beta promotion, Renoise 2.7 is available at €40 for new users. We're lowering the entry barrier to our beta cycle, known as the feature improvement phase before the final release. Already registered? Then why not bump your version for €32 in the Backstage?
# WHAT'S NEW?
Renoise's internal instruments have been re-engineered. The focal point is a new keyzone editor that supports overlapping, velocity, and key release mappings. The Sample Keyzones editor brings with it user interface refinements, improved drumkit generation, better tuning options, new sample properties, and loop modes. Live instrumentalists can also tap into new realtime rendering modes and MIDI input routing, making Renoise on a laptop a formidable replacement for your old sampler.
New Slice Markers push Renoise's breakbeat insanity one step further. With the click of a button, your break is sliced and keymapped. Amens away! More than just a beatslicer, creatives will soon discover custom offsets and the power of aliases for controlling longer recordings like vocals and soundscapes.
The revamped Automation Editor now provides a zoomable overview of the entire song, as well as vastly improved envelope resolution. Navigating is smooth, dragging and drawing easier, so simple yet so useful.
Internal FX get an injection of winning with a new Comb Filter and a Multiband Send that lets you surgically redirect a single sound source to 3 send tracks. New draggable gain and frequency handles in the native EQs add flavour and finesse to the tools. Other changes include improvements to DSSI, MIDI optimizations, hardware-compatible solo mode, adjustable audio headroom, pre-count, ameliorations to the Lua API, and numerous other changes in every aspect of the app; no stone was left unturned in this release.
Full changelog with screenshots here:
* http://www.renoise.com/new
# NEW DEVELOPER ANNOUNCEMENT:
In the last Renoise iteration the core dev team included: Eduard Müller (Taktik), who may have worked on version one of some other Berlin based DAW. Erik Jälevik, whose previous gig was lead C++ programmer at Last.fm, and his prize-winning university project "Beatrak - An Application for Automatic Beat Tracking and Cataloguing of Music Collections" ain't too shabby. Lucio Asnaghi (kRAkEn/gORe), a seasoned Linux developer whose other work include Jost, the Jucetice project, and more.
Welcome to the newest contributor: Kieran Foster, aka dblue, aka author of the dblue/illformed Glitch VST. Kieran has been the official Renoise support liaison for the last year and is relocating to Berlin to brainstorm and work with the others at Renoise HQ. Interesting times ahead!
# ABOUT RENOISE:
Renoise is a sophisticated music sequencer and audio processing application for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. It's a unique all-in-one music production environment for your personal computer.
Renoise's rock-solid stability makes it ideal as a live jamming tool. You can map almost every part of the interface to a MIDI controller, run your guitar through a Line-In Device and distort it with native effects, or just use it as a drum machine; a sampler on steroids.
Renoise's open API allows programmers to easily extend Renoise. With a few lines of code you can add the features or tools that you always wanted but never dared to ask for.
Renoise is based on mod trackers. Mod trackers are characterized by displaying and editing music in an easily understood grid known as a pattern. These patterns are akin to sheet music, but are displayed alphanumerically instead of with musical notation.
Renoise boasts full ReWire and Jack support, FX and instrument VST/AU/LADSPA/DSSI plug-in support, automatic plug-in delay compensation, multi-core load balancing, MIDI I/O, OpenSoundControl, audio recording, flexible audio output, graphical & numerical parameter automation, modular parameter routing, and much more.
Due to its keyboard driven workflow, it makes the creation of desktop music far quicker than in a traditional MIDI-based sequencer. For experienced users, and those who don't necessarily want to be bound to piano roll systems to make music, it offers a refreshing approach to composing and is one of the most efficient ways to do so using a computer.
Instead of spending hours cobbling beats together with a mouse, why not do it in seconds with just a few keystrokes in Renoise? Whether you're an audio veteran or just starting out, Renoise is a fantastic addition to any bedroom or professional studio.
Got laptop? Use Renoise.
# WEBSITE:
* http://www.renoise.com
On behalf of the entire Rivendell development team, I'm pleased to announce the release of the second release candidate of Rivendell 2.x, v2.0.0rc1. Rivendell is a full-featured radio automation system targeted for use in
professional broadcast environments. It is available under the GNU General Public License.
From the NEWS file:
*** snip snip ***
This is the second release candidate of Rivendell 2.x. All changes made
since 2.0.0rc0 have involved fixes for reported bugs and improved
integration with various distributions and desktop environments. See
the ChangeLog for specifics.
If upgrading from a v1.x version of Rivendell, be sure to read the
'UPGRADING' file before proceeding for important information.
Database Update:
This version of Rivendell uses database schema version 202, and will
automatically upgrade any earlier versions. To see the current schema
version prior to upgrade, see RDAdmin->SystemInfo.
As always, be sure to run RDAdmin immediately after upgrading to allow
any necessary changes to the database schema to be applied. Due to the
complexity of the schema changes required for this update, the process
may take significantly longer to execute than is commonly the case;
users are cautioned to allow for ample time operationally.
** snip snip ***
Further information, screenshots and download links are available at:
http://www.rivendellaudio.org/
Cheers!
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer |
| | Paravel Systems |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| A room without books is like a body without a soul. |
| -- Cicero |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
A new version of the Simple Sine Generator LV2 plugin is available.
Simple Sine Generator is very simple instrument/generator plugin with
midi in and audio out. It is expected to be useful for testing LV2 hosts
and as base for writing your own plugins.
It is written in plain C.
= What is new =
* Don't use the lv2_event_helpers
* Add comments to the code
* Use URI defines where available
* Build debuggable shared library and enable all warnings
* Various improvements/cleanup in the makefile
= Download =
http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/ssg/ssg-1.14.tar.bz2http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/ssg/ssg-1.14.tar.bz2.sig
--
Nedko Arnaudov <GnuPG KeyID: 7862B9E45D1B58ED>
Dear all,
More than a month overdue... It's getting busier at work (we're in the
middle of a reorganization) and also I've spent quite some time on
making music. And LAC2011 is coming closer, I'm going to do two
workshops so I had to prepare my abstracts. Hope you have a nice read
anyway, next time I'll try to publish the round-up a bit earlier (well,
have to hurry up then already...).
http://linuxaudio.org/node/128
Best,
Jeremy
Tarball containing D-Bus patched jack 0.120.1 is available here:
http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/jack/dbus/http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/jack/dbus/jack-audio-connection-kit-dbus-0.…http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/jack/dbus/jack-audio-connection-kit-dbus-0.…
D-Bus modifications add optional autodetected support for the D-Bus
based server control system.
D-Bus is object model that provides IPC mechanism. D-Bus supports
autoactivation of objects, thus making it simple and reliable to code a
"single instance" application or daemon, and to launch applications and
daemons on demand when their services are needed.
* Simplified single thread model for control and monitor
applications. Various D-Bus language bindings make it trivial to
write control and monitor applications using scripting languages like
Python, Ruby, Perl, etc..
* JACK has log file (~/.log/jack/jackdbus.log) that is available for
inspection even when autoactivation happens because of first JACK
application is launched.
* There is real configuration file used to persist settings that can be
manipulated through configuration interface of JACK D-Bus object.
* Improved graph inspection and control mechanism. JACK graph is
versioned. Connections, ports and clients have unique (monotonically
increasing) numeric IDs.
* High level abstraction of JACK settings. Allows applications that can
configure JACK to expose parameters that were not known at compile
(or tarball release) time.
Currently there are some minor differences between jack1 jackdbus and
jack2 jackdbus:
* There is no parameter constraints support (no enums and no ranges)
* Settings file (in ~/.config/jack/) is conf-jack1.xml instead of
conf.xml, because jack1 and jack2 settings and not really compatible.
When configured with D-Bus support, jack_control is
installed. jack_control is simple commandline interface for jackdbus.
Other tools that can communicate with JACK through D-Bus:
* LADItools (tray icon, configuration, etc.)
* Patchage (and lpatchage too)
* LASH 0.6.x
* ladish
* QJackCtl
If the packaging ppl need a patch against 0.120.1, I'd be happy to
provide one.
--
Nedko Arnaudov <GnuPG KeyID: 7862B9E45D1B58ED>
http://jackaudio.org/downloads/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.120.1.tar.gz
JACK 0.120.1 represents more than a year of incremental development on
JACK1. The majority of the work has been done by Torben Hohn, and
includes one major API revision and one major API addition, along with
a quite a few other fixes, API clarifications and new utilities.
The addition is the new Session API that allows for easy management
(save/restore) of multi-client configurations. The core JACK release
does not include a session management application, but QJackctl
already offers this. The session API has already been implemented in
Jack2. Please see below for links to read about this API.
The revision involves the API used to manage and discover latency in
JACK signal flow, and unlike the existing one (now marked as
deprecated)), this one can actually do what it needs to do. Anyone who
has written a client that used the existing port latency API should
update their client to use the new one: the old API will be removed
when we move to API/protocol version 1.0.0 which will be soon.
Please note that the latency API has not been implemented in Jack2 at
this time.
Usage Changes
=============
* add -M command line flag to allow user-specified MIDI buffer
sizing The units of the argument to this command line flag are
"MIDI events per process() cycle", where an event occupies up to
4 bytes (as most common MIDI events do). The default buffer size
is same as the one used for audio data, which will store about 2
MIDI events per sample. Typical values for event-count will
range from 10 to about 500. Be aware that using very high values
along with a large number of ports may cause JACK to fail to
start because of the amount of memory that would be required.
* several new utility clients:
- jack_midi_dump (Carl Hetherington) (displays MIDI events
arriving at its input port as text in its
originating terminal window)
- jack_iodelay (from the original jdelay in C++ by Fons
Adriensen; ported to C by Torben Hohn)
- jack_latent_client (for testing latency API)
- jack_session_notify (a minimal session manager)
Developer-visible Changes
=========================
Applications can now request weak linkage for all function symbols in
the JACK API.
See http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__WeakLinkage.html for more
information.
Using Port Buffers before activating a client
---------------------------------------------
It has always been undefined behaviour to try to use JACK port buffers
outside of a process callback. This release adds an additional
limitation: any call to jack_port_get_buffer() before jack_activate()
will return NULL rather than a usable address. This may cause issues
in clients which did this - the behaviour was always wrong, but was
not enforced by JACK.
Determining and tracking port buffer sizes
-------------------------------------------
A few details about detecting the port buffer sizes have changed:
* clients should now use jack_port_type_get_buffer_size() if they
absolutely must determine buffer sizes before they call
jack_activate(). The use of jack_port_get_buffer_size() before
calling jack_activate() is now forbidden and may result in the
client crashing.
* clients that care about port buffer sizes should register a
buffer size callback. The callback will now always be executed
during a call to jack_activate(). This ensures that on return
from jack_activate() and before the first call to its process
callback, the client definitely knows the buffer size. Future
callbacks will occur if the buffer size changes. Note that older
versions of JACK do not necessarily call the buffer size
callback during jack_activate() - this behaviour should be
considered a serious bug in JACK and another reason to upgrade.
Session API
------------
JACK Session is a new section of the JACK API that is designed to
allow management of JACK configurations that involve multiple
clients. Use of the API is optional by clients, but is strongly
recommended.
The API is fully documented online:
* API Reference:
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__SessionClientFunctions.html
* Walkthrough for client developers:
http://trac.jackaudio.org/wiki/WalkThrough/Dev/JackSession
Latency API
------------
The older latency management API is now deprecated because it was
fundamentally broken (in the sense that it could not do what it
claimed to be able to do)
The new API is fully documented online
* API Reference:
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__LatencyFunctions.html
* Conceptual diagram: http://jackaudio.org/files/jack-latency.png
All relevant included clients and backends have beem updated to use it.
Bug Fixes, Tweaks Etc. Etc
==========================
* switch all example clients and tools to use jack_client_open()
* README emptied to just point at http://jackaudio.org/
* replace use of pthread_t in public headers with jack_native_thread_t
* offer build time option to make code 100% valgrind clean
* shm.c released under LGPL, not GPL, to match the rest of libjack
* fixes for rare crashes in alsa_in/out
* netjack1 support for Celt 0.9
* check arguments given to jack_bufsize, to prevent server lockup
* check arguments to jack_set_buffer_size() in server
* jack_connect can use client UUIDs
* sanitycheck now no longer warms about unlimited lockable memory
* sanitycheck no longer mentions nice
* fix race conditions near client exit/shutdown/zombiefication
* no watchdog operations while freewheeling (JACK will no longer
die if freewheeling is very, very slow)
* (incomplete) new internal client code based on a2jmidid
(originally by Dmitry Baikov & Nedko Arnaudov)