Merry season greetings!
After a very long quarantine period, and while after the last Flirty
Ditz romance, this pet has calmly bumped a few more steps ahead. Please
welcome, my Christmas present to y'all,
Qtractor 0.3.0 (fluffy doll) has been released!
Same old intro follows:
Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application, written in
C++ on top of Qt Software's Qt4 framework, having JACK and ALSA as its
main infrastructures and Linux as native and exclusive platform.
Specially suited to the lone-wolf composer, arranger and (re)creative
music-maker personal home-studio, it still hopes to evolve as a fairly
featured desktop audio/MIDI workstation or at least, a prototypical part
of it ;)
Release highlights:
* Paste-Repeat command. (NEW)
* Punch in/out recording. (NEW)
* Session/project template support. (NEW)
* Current track auto-monitoring. (NEW)
* MIDI buses now supporting multi-timbral instrument plug-ins. (NEW)
* Individual clip gain/volume, normalize and audio/MIDI file export. (NEW)
* Copy/paste to desktop environment clipboard. (NEW)
* and many, many fixes and new bugs ;)
Website:
http://qtractor.sourceforge.net
Project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor
Downloads:
- source tarball
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.3.0.tar.gz
- user manual
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.3.0-user-manual.pdf
Weblog (think upstream support):
http://www.rncbc.org
License:
Qtractor is free, open-source software, distributed under the terms of
the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.
Features:
- Multi-track audio and MIDI sequencing and recording.
- Developed on pure Qt4 C++ application framework (no Qt3 nor KDE
dependencies).
- Uses JACK for audio and ALSA sequencer for MIDI as multimedia
infrastructures.
- Traditional multi-track tape recorder control paradigm.
- Audio file formats support: OGG (via libvorbis), MP3 (via libmad,
playback only), WAV, FLAC, AIFF and many, many more (via libsndfile).
- Standard MIDI files support (SMF format 0 and 1).
- Non-destructive, non-linear editing.
- Unlimited number of tracks per session/project.
- Unlimited number of overlapping clips per track.
- XML encoded session/project description file.
- Point-and-click, multi-select, drag-and-drop interaction (drag, move,
drop, cut, copy, paste, delete, split)
- Unlimited undo/redo.
- Built-in mixer and monitor controls.
- Built-in connection patchbay control and persistence (a-la QjackCtl).
- LADSPA, DSSI and native VST plug-ins support.
- Unlimited number of plug-ins per track or bus.
- Plug-in presets, programs and chunk/configurations support.
- Audio/MIDI clip fade-in/out (linear, quadratic, cubic).
- Audio/MIDI clip gain/volume, normalize and export.
- Audio clip time-stretching (WSOLA-like or via librubberband),
pitch-shifting (also via librubberband) and seamless sample-rate
conversion (via libsamplerate).
- Audio/MIDI track export (mix-down, merge).
- Audio/MIDI metronome bar/beat clicks.
- MIDI clip editor (matrix/piano roll).
- MIDI instrument definitions (a-la Cakewalk(tm))
- JACK transport sync master.
- MMC control surface enabled.
- Configurable keyboard shortcuts.
Change-log:
- Almost complete rewrite of the plugin configuration and parameter
initialization logic.
- MIDI bank/program selection is now taken into account on plugins
initialization and replication.
- Fixed initial parameter values for native VST plugins.
- Track form plugin lists are now properly (re)initialized when track
type changes.
- Generic plugin forms now have the option to show/hide the parameter
widgets through the new "Params" button.
- New auto-monitor toggle option (menu Track/Auto Monitor): the current
selected track is now set on monitor and MIDI channel omni-mode
automagically, as a convenient workflow feature (kindly suggested by
Holborn).
- MIDI clip editor Tools menu is not disabled anymore when there's no
selection, drop-down menu items are instead.
- Make all recorded clips to honor either the punch-out or play-head
accumulated position; resolve all pending MIDI sequence note events on
record stop/close.
- Major silent move: audio plugins chain are now applied in a
pre-fader/meter basis as is usually implied from the mixer strip layout
ie. signal flows from the top to the bottom.
- All MIDI buses may now have plugins inserted so that multi-timbral
synth/sampler plugins get driven to their fullness.
- MIDI track plugin's dedicated audio output bus may now be effective,
as it seems, good old master audio output bus was being used, no matter
what.
- Paste-repeat command has been introduced, now allowing to replicate
and concatenate the clipboard contents over the time-line, with a given
repeat-count and optional period (see menu Edit/Paste Repeat... on the
main and MIDI clip editor windows).
- Normalize tool on MIDI clip editor got rewritten from its previous
brain dead, useless and utterly wrong operation.
- All time offsets and lengths are now zero-bar/beat based when
displayed in the BBT (bar.beat.ticks) format.
- MMC STEP gets adjusted to current snap-per-beat setting.
- Fixed broken initial buffering that was randomly crippling those audio
clips that fit integrally in cached and while on playback.
- Fix initialization of multiple instances of DSSI plugins which
implement run_multiple_synths (eg. fluidsynth-dssi), preventing an
instant crash on activation.
- Exclude deprecated VST elements from compilation.
- Export tracks dialog has new punch in/out range option.
- Somehow realized that looping and punch-recording are two mutually
exclusive states, at least until loop recording (ie. takes) gets real.
- Fixed bug #2249291 - Crash on tempo change; affecting the WSOLA based
time-stretching on all non-stereo audio clips.
- Incomplete audio peaks were being cached prematurely, fixed.
- Make way for paste/dropping items from the system clipboard over the
main track view. Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete of file items have now this
workaround fixed, wrt. Files widget keyboard shortcuts, respectively.
- Clip gain/volume propriety is now in place and reflected in audio clip
waveform drawing in particular.
- A new hideous progress bar is now lurking in the main status line, as
found convenient to display progress of the also new clip tools
(normalize, export, etc.).
- Clip normalize tool is now available (Edit/Clip/Normalise).
- Audio and MIDI clip file export is now available as a tool (see
Edit/Clip/Export...).
- Punch in/out (range) recording is now in experimental shape, with
minimal settings and functionality, already accessible through the main
menus, transport toolbars and visible on main tracks view and MIDI
editors as magenta colored line markers.
- External MIDI control events for channel volume (7) and channel
panning (10) are now handled properly through session tracks.
- Session file templates make its debut with new usability option, on
whether new sessions are created based on existing template file (see
View/Options.../Display/Session/New session template; nb. session
templates are just regular session files but loaded and saved with no
media content (no clips nor files).
- Grayed/disabled palette color group fix for dark color themes.
- Implicit attempt to flush all pending notes for some, if not most
plugin instruments (eg. VSTi), on playback stop.
- Fait-divers: desktop menu file touched to openSUSE conventions.
- Internal refactoring alert: Session and Options instances are now
being redesigned as singletons, preparing to get out of the way from the
master GUI/MainForm instance.
- Clip drawing methods refactored so let the fade-in/out handles get
seen with transparency over the clip graphics content.
- Reset and continue looping even still when continue past end transport
option is not set and playback is rolling.
Hope it makes through a Happy New Year with flying colors ;)
Cheers && Enjoy!
--
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela
rncbc(a)rncbc.org
Hi,
As you may know there exists a cross-platform graphics library called SDL.
It is mainly used for games, but it is excellent for normal app's also.
Some time ago I wrote a GUI toolkit on top of SDL, called SDL-widgets.
It is far from complete, because I focussed on 2 example audio applications,
that might also be of interest for visitors of this newsgroup.
The first example app is called make-waves. It can:
- draw waveforms to the screen, modulate them by each other, you can listen
to the result,
- draw a physical model of a string or a spring that you can listen to and
animate with the mouse,
- draw and edit the harmonic spectrum of a sound,
- display the frequency curve of digital filters, that you also can plug in
yourself.
The 2nd example app, wav2spectrum, can read a wave file and perform FFT
analysis on it. You can scroll through the cached waveform chunks and FFT
spectra easily.
I tried to document the toolkit and the examples fairly well, so maybe
they have some use for others as well. You can get it from:
http://members.chello.nl/w.boeke/SDL-widgets/index.html
Kind regards,
Wouter Boeke
Hi,
this mail is a short reminder that the LAC2009(1) Call for Papers is currently
active and awaiting your papers at (2).
The paper submission period ends on
Thursday, January 15, 2009, 24:00 UTC
so use the (hopefully) free time of the Christmas holidays to get your paper
into shape and upload it in time!
Hope to see you there,
Frank, on behalf of the LAC2009 organization team
(1) The LAC (Linux Audio Conference) is an annual event where developers,
users and composers from all around the world come together for 4 days
to present current developments, new compositions and other news to the
public, listen to concerts, and generally have a good time together.
The LAC2009 is taking place at the Casa della Musica in Parma, Italy,
from April 16th to 19th, 2009. The conference homepage is at
http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2009/.
(2) Paper submission information:
http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2009/call-for-papers/
Paper submission upload form:
http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2009/openconf/openconf.php
Hi
This is the synthesizer engine of horgand released as dssi plugin, including 28 banks of 32 sounds each one.
Sound edtion is not allowed, is only for use as sound font in your favorite sequencer.
Anyway you can create new sounds with the standalone horgand.
Thanks to all the dssi plugin authors, without their works would have never been able to do this.
Take a look in:
http://horgand.berlios.de/horgand-dssi.png
and the tarball in the project page:
http://horgand.berlios.de/
Comments on LAU are welcome.
Josep
--
Josep Andreu <holborn(a)telefonica.net>
The 0.8 release of dssi-vst is now available.
dssi-vst is an adapter that allows users of Linux audio software to
take VST and VSTi audio effects and instrument plugins compiled for
Windows, and load them into native LADSPA or DSSI plugin hosts.
dssi-vst can also be used to run 32-bit Windows VST plugins in a
64-bit Linux host.
http://www.breakfastquay.com/dssi-vst/
The main change in version 0.8 is to make building dssi-vst on 64-bit
systems much simpler.
Chris
Sonic Annotator is a utility program for batch feature extraction from
audio files. It runs Vamp audio analysis plugins on audio files and
can write the result features in a selection of formats, in particular
as RDF using the Audio Features and Event ontologies.
A somewhat experimental first public release (0.1) is now available.
For more details and for downloads, please see
http://www.omras2.org/SonicAnnotator
Sonic Annotator was developed at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen
Mary, University of London. It was funded by the EPSRC through the
OMRAS2 project and is Free Software published under the GNU General
Public License.
Chris
Sonic Visualiser is an application for inspecting and analysing the
contents of music audio files. It combines powerful waveform and
spectral visualisation tools with automated feature extraction plugins
and annotation capabilities.
Version 1.4 of Sonic Visualiser is now available.
http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/
This is a feature release, containing several new features and a
number of bug fixes over the previous 1.3 release. For more details,
please read the release notes at
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=646456
Sonic Visualiser contains advanced waveform and spectrogram viewers,
as well as editors for many sorts of audio annotations. Besides
visualisation, it can make and play selections based on the locations
of automatically detected features, seamlessly loop playback of single
or multiple noncontiguous regions, synthesise annotations for
playback, slow down playback while retaining display synchronisation,
and show the ongoing alignment in time between multiple recordings of
a piece with different timings.
Sonic Visualiser supports the Vamp plugin API for plugins that extract
descriptive or analytical data from audio. Vamp plugins for onset,
pitch and note detection, tempo tracking, chromagram analysis,
constant-Q spectrogram, spectral centroid, power curve, key
estimation, tonal change detection, harmonic spectrogram, structural
segmentation, timbral similarity, audio alignment calculation and a
large number of low-level spectral features are available. There is
also a comprehensive SDK for use by developers of Vamp plugins and
hosts. For more information about Vamp plugins, please see:
http://www.vamp-plugins.org/
Sonic Visualiser was developed at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen
Mary, University of London:
http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/
Ongoing work on Sonic Visualiser and audio feature representation in
the semantic web is carried out as part of the OMRAS2 project funded
by the EPSRC. See
http://omras2.org/
for more information.
Sonic Visualiser is Free Software distributed under the GNU General
Public License. The 1.4 release is available now in source code form
or as binaries for Linux, OS/X, and Windows.
Chris
[Note: this announcement is about closed-source software]
Version 1.5 of the QM Vamp Plugins -- a set of audio analysis plugins
in the Vamp plugin format, developed at the Centre for Digital Music
at Queen Mary, University of London -- is now available for download.
Plugins included are note onset detector, beat tracker, tempo estimator, key
estimator, tonal change detector, structural segmenter, timbral and
rhythmic similarity, chromagram, constant-Q spectrogram, and MFCC
calculation.
This release focuses on reliability and performance improvements.
For downloads, please see:
http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/downloads/index.html#qm-vamp-plugins
The plugins are available in binary form only and may be freely used
for any purpose, and redistributed for non-commercial purposes only.
Supported platforms are 32- and 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows, and OS/X
10.4 or newer (Intel/PPC universal).
This release also features more substantial documentation than
previously, available at:
http://www.vamp-plugins.org/plugin-doc/qm-vamp-plugins.html
For more information about Vamp plugins, please see
http://www.vamp-plugins.org/
Chris
Version 2.0 of the Vamp plugin SDK is now available.
http://www.vamp-plugins.org/
Vamp is a plugin API for audio analysis and feature extraction plugins
written in C or C++. Its SDK features an easy-to-use set of C++
classes for plugin and host developers, a reference host
implementation, example plugins, and documentation. It is supported
across Linux, OS/X and Windows.
A documentation guide to writing plugins using the Vamp SDK can be
found at http://www.vamp-plugins.org/guide.pdf.
== What's new in 2.0?
* Each returned feature can now specify a proper duration as well
as start time, value array, and label.
* A new PluginSummarisingAdapter is provided in the host SDK,
permitting hosts to easily obtain summary results such as averages
based on a plugin's returned features.
* An RDF ontology is provided for the description of Vamp plugin
capabilities and configurations (see http://omras2.org/VampOntology).
* The SDK libraries have been reorganised so as to draw a clearer
distinction between plugin and host SDKs.
* Better platform-specific build documentation is provided (in the
build directory), particularly for MSVC builds which now also feature
project files for the example plugins.
* Two new example plugins have been added (Simple Power Spectrum
and Fixed Tempo Estimator).
* The command-line host provided now has an extra-informative
plugin information listing option (--list-full).
== Backward compatibility
A detailed compatibility statement is included in the SDK, but to summarise:
* Plugins and hosts built with 1.x and 2.0 SDKs are mutually
compatible. You can load old plugins in new hosts and new plugins in
old hosts.
* Plugins written for 1.x can be compiled against 2.0 without modification.
* Hosts written for 1.x will require some changes to #include
directives, but most hosts should compile against 2.0 without other
modifications.
* Although the plugin binary interface is compatible with 1.x, the
SDK libraries are not binary compatible with the 1.x libraries.
Plugins and host code will need to be recompiled if they are to be
updated to 2.0, not just re-linked.
== Credits
This work was carried out at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary,
University of London. It was funded by the EPSRC through the OMRAS2
project EP/E017614/1. See http://omras2.org/ for more information.
Chris
On behalf of the entire Rivendell development team, I'm pleased to announce
the release of Rivendell v1.2.0. Rivendell is a full-featured radio
automation system targeted for use in professional broadcast environments. It
is available under the GNU General Public License. Changes in this release
include (from the NEWS file):
*** snip snip ***
Changes:
RDCatch Download Events. An 'Event Offset' setting has been added to
Download Events to allow date wildcards used in the URL field to be offset
by the indicated number of days.
Hard Time Handling in Logs. The logic for processing hard start times in
logs has been changed so that a hard time event will be executed when wall
clock time matches regardless of it's place relative to other hard timed
events.
Now & Next Changes. A new plugin architecture has been added that makes it
possible to create "Rivendell Loadable Modules" (RLMs for short) that can
be used to generate Now & Next PAD data to a wide array of external devices
and services. Runtime plugin configuration is accomplished in
RDAdmin->ManageHosts->RDAirPlay->ConfigureNow&Next. A set of sample
plugins is provided for transmitting data via UDP and serial ports as well
as for interfacing to 'social networking' services such as Twitter and
FaceBook. Information on writing new plugins can be found in the 'rlm.h'
header file.
Dropbox Changes. Several new dropbox features have been added, including
the ability to configure a box not to delete source files after import
(particularly useful in conjunction with satellite-based audio delivery
services such as AMB-OS and PRSS ContentDepot). Also new is the ability to
apply an automatic date offset to any encoded Start or End Date value of
imported files.
Automated System Management. It is now possible to configure various
objects to be automatically purged from the system after they expire. For
audio cuts, this can be configured on a group-wide basis in
RDAdmin->ManageGroups, while Logs and ELR data purging can be configured in
RDAdmin->ManageServices.
RDLogManager Enhancements. A 'Remarks' field has been added to the Event
and Clock dialogs to provide an area for entering free-form text notes.
GPIO Enhancements. It is now possible to configure separate and
independent macro carts to execute upon the rising and falling state of a
GPIO line.
Username Length. The previous limit of a maximum of eight characters in a
Rivendell username has been increased to 255, thus allowing for better
integration with external authentication systems such as Active Directory.
Bugfixes. Several bugfixes have been implemented -- see the ChangeLog for
details.
Database Update:
This version of Rivendell uses database schema version 170, 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.
*** snip snip ***
Further information, screenshots and download links are available at:
http://www.rivendellaudio.org/
Cheers!
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer |
| | Paravel Systems |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. |
| -- William Blake |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|