Qtractor 0.7.1 - The Meson Dope beta release

Hey,

Here's to all southerners for whom the so called Summer'15 didn't made much sense...

Beg your pardon yet and again, but it's that time of year when grapefruit is about ripening, pretty fast and maybe late, at least on the northern hemisphere. No worries: harvesting has already been carried away. So it's your call now, wether it makes for ugly bad wine or, pretty good vinegar...

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. --Aristophanes

never mind,

Now, for the clueless:

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

And for the ones who can aptly tell a TL;DR apart from a hangover:

Besides the incidental bug-fixes and proverbial business-as-usual stance for this dot release, the most probable and hopefully significant news about it, is that this will be the last to build against Qt4 by default.

Time has come to move on up to Qt5. Remember that a Qt5 build is and has been possible already for ages now but somewhat relegated on a subpar status due to the once lack of support for all non-Qt5 LV2 plug-ins GUIs out there. Not anymore! Starting from this very release onwards there's this so called native LV2 GTK2 and X11 UI support on Qt5. Also thriving, drobilla's libsuil is being updated to par just that as well. So things are all aligning up nigh.

A special note to the voluntary packager: if you choose, for any reason you may find commendable, to build, package and distribute a Qt5 build (via ./configure --enable-qt5 ...) please be sure that every LV2 plug-ins around that take Qt as its UI framework are also build, packaged and distributed on the same premises, otherwise they might just fail and crash Qtractor on show. Among those are the ones comprised by the Vee One Suite, namely synthv1, samplv1 and drumkv1, of course.

Also as a(nother) side note: It has been for quite some time there's an alternate github.com repository which is kept in sync with the sf.net one. However, this doesn't mean that the Qtractor project is about to migrate to brand new hosting whatsoever: the original upstream source code repository is, will be, as ever was, always kept somewhere else still in this world and universe. It's a Git world out nowadays and as the mottos says, --everything-is-local, --distributed-is-the-new-centralized ;)

Enjoy.

Website:

Project page:

Downloads:

• source tarball:
  qtractor-0.7.1.tar.gz
• source package (openSUSE 13.2):
  qtractor-0.7.1-19.rncbc.suse132.src.rpm
• binary packages (openSUSE 13.2):
  qtractor-0.7.1-19.rncbc.suse132.i586.rpm
  qtractor-0.7.1-19.rncbc.suse132.x86_64.rpm

Wiki (help wanted!):

License:

Change-log:

• Fixed an ages old MIDI track/channel instrument mapping (bank, program) issue that prevented normal all-shut-up messages from being sent to MIDI output buses/ports on playback stop.
• Messages standard output capture has been improved again, now in both ways a non-blocking pipe may get.
• Fixed port on MIDI 14-bit controllers input caching.
• Fixed false value readings on the MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll) tool-tips, when dragging a note velocity or controller value outside the acceptable nominal range (eg. 0-127).
• Added LV2_BUF_SIZE__nominalBlockLength option support (patch by falktx aka. Filipe Coelho, thanks).
• Fixed wrong initial tempo/time-signature display when session is loaded from command line.
• LV2 plug-in UI GTK2 and X11 in Qt5 host native support added.
• Transport/Auto Backward feature now honoring (auto return) to same current location precedence as Transport/Backward.
• Single/unique application instance control adapted to Qt5/X11 (cf. configure --enable-xunique).
• MIDI Tools/Transpose, Resize duration display format (frames, time or BBT) have been fixed.
• Build fix for Qt5.5 (patch by KaOS, thanks).
• MIDI Tools/Quantize et al. are tentatively being corrected to take event times as relative to THE beginning of session, instead of MIDI clip start location.

Enjoy && have fun.