Time is the ultimate judge.

Last week-end the farthest of longjmp()'s has been invoked. Dennis Ritchie passed away. One book that I'm keen to remember was, and still is, "The C Programming Language", usually abbreviated as by just The K&R book. K's standing for Brian Kernighan, the R for the now late Dennis. This book changed, or better said, shaped my role in life or may I say it loud, my role in the society as we live in or I know about.

There's an excess of a quarter a century in my own life on this nostalgia already. Wait, it is not quite nostalgia as in portuguese term saudade, but an ever lasting spirit that still lingers on.

Dennis, on that regard, you are still alive. As long as any C compiler gets its toll. You are immortal. I envy you. I cannot stop repeating myself. As long as any C/C++ compiler gets its due, you won't ever rest in peace. I'm afraid it will be restless for times to come. So, there's no usual obituary R.I.P. from here to you Dennis, sorry.

I owe [you] much.

Cheers.

On the verge of the summer solstice (read astronomical years middle point) and after years in the making (read procrastination), track automation or dynamic curves, as some like to call, is finally a reality, tricky though but real nevertheless. The very first milestone has been bumped over already and is publicly available for the brave to experiment. All in the latest & greatest subversion trunk, of course.

It's all gone by now. Another year, yet another LAC is now accomplished. For the first time ever, it took place on a officially English-speaking country besides the native Gaelic/Irish alternative. The Linux Audio Conference 2011, just ran out at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Music Department, Maynooth, on May 6-8 2011 for the record.

Ephemerally, it also marked the 9th edition of the meeting. A very happy anniversary to the LAD's! On my shift, it was just the 7th time in a row and sure am happy as well. I'm humble enough to tell that this year everything went so smooth that I'm really having a hard time finding a good incidental spot to blog about. Alas, it's all gone now, business as usual, I should tell.

Late spring cleaning interruptus for some ramblings and babbling about my trip to the International Linux Audio Conference, LAC2010@HKU-Utrecht, which took place at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, May 1st to 4th.. Time is failing on me, or wasn't that the top excuse from this one self-called über-procrastinator. Better late than never.

Once again, five times now, I came to attend the annual international Linux Audio developers meeting, as it is on my call, being my main motivation the same as it has been since always: to meet and find together all the guys and gals that make up the scene. And so there we were. I am sorry to tell that this blog entry won't be in any way a chronicle of the conference but more like something else. Just a messy collection of thoughts that were haunting this vacant mind during those days.

QmidiCtl is a MIDI remote controller application that sends MIDI data over the network, using UDP/IP multi-cast. It has been designed primarily for the Maemo enabled handheld devices, namely the Nokia N900. In its current development state, which is obviously alpha as of this writing, it puts a mini multi-track recording control surface on your hands and on the go, so to speak. MMC is the feature and yours truly Qtractor the target. However, any other MMC enabled DAW may be considered.

However nothing of this would be possible without this little thing that gets also here its release announcement: QmidiNet is a MIDI network gateway application that sends and receives MIDI data (ALSA Sequencer) over the network, using UDP/IP multi-cast. Fundamentally inspired by multimidicast and designed to be compatible with ipMIDI for Windows, it's a little tiny application that sits as an icon on your system tray and exposes one or more ALSA Sequencer client ports which open the way for a MIDI network mesh. Pretty neat if you think wireless and not necessarily because of QmidiCtl.

Alas, you can transform any Linux/ALSA computer (or Windows/ipMIDI enabled one, if you dare to) into a MIDI-over-IP inter-connected node.

Be free, without cables :)

Some might like to know that free-hand drawing is now featured on the MIDI clip editor (aka piano-roll). It's one click away from the Edit/Select Mode/Edit On menu or the pencil tool-button.

Speaking of overdue TODO lines, another one bites the dust. On SVN trunk (qtractor-0.4.5.1516+) of course.

Oh Sunday, boring Sunday... :o) Well, swing-quantize has just sneaked in the SVN trunk (qtractor-0.4.5.1502+). You can bear this from MIDI clip editor's (aka piano-roll) Tools/Quantize... menu.

Basically, the way I've implemented it, is kind of a deformed grid quantization, which distorts even numbered (beat, quarter-note, seminima, whatever) divisions by a given percentage, something that can pictured as follows....

Klaatu kindly writes to say how he loves Qtractor and uses it all the time for podcast production and as one of the central applications for producing his two-person band. He has written two tutorials on Qtractor and covered it on two podcast episodes at The Bad Apples Linux Oggcast. Awesome! Happy Thanks-Giving!

For whom it might concern, and pertaining the projects that are hosted in SourceForge.net, good old CVS use is now stalled and deprecated. Better yet, it should be terminated from this very moment. All (my) projects, QjackCtl, Qsynth, Qsampler and last but not least, Qtractor, are now served in Subversion (aka SVN) source code control flavors. The latest of the bunch, QXGEdit was already made on it so there's no need for alarm on that front.

As all things in life gonna change, sooner or later, this server of yours has gone under deep and severe changes. Still experimental and by no means definitive. Nevertheless is now live again, kicking briefly or else. You tell.

All made amazingly possible with one stop help of SUSE Studio^TM.