Once again there comes the time when I figure out that yet another month has gone through since the last one of those so called pre-releases, the kind I name this sort of alpha sneak-previews of crappy-buggy software. But that's just me ;) Sometimes, when you just know about too much too well the gears and stuff of something ingenious, you get that strange feeling of somewhat shallow confidence, to say the least. Hey! Am I under some kind of depression or what? My own answer is what :)

After a very long period of judging progress, which practically took the whole summer, the folks from the Qt Centre have come to a verdict with regard to their first edition of the Qt Centre Programming Contest 2007. The contest results have finally arrived this last weekend, and besides the understandable delay I sincerely hope this one won't be the last. Congratulations to the whole organization team, judges, sponsors, contestants and of course, last but not least, to the winners :)

This last Saturday, September the 1st, I was pleased to attend the first National openSUSE Portuguese Meeting (ENOS), in a reply to a special and kind envitation from Carlos Gonçalves and António Cardoso Martins, for whom I'm most thankful in giving me the rare opportunity to show off and make some ad-hoc talk presentation about this Linux Audio/MIDI hobby stuff of mine. The meeting was a success and I wish I could have made it even better if I had done some more thoughful preparation (ie. homework).

Finally, after a frenzy full weekend without any other worries than doing 'round-da-clock nasty and boresome recoding, I have this news result that QjackCtl migration to Qt4 is now complete and all has already been committed to CVS a few minutes ago.

Yeah, Summer is here and I don't want to stay home grueling any longer.

That's right. As of today and without warning, Qsynth has been officially ported to Qt4, completely and without a trace of Qt3 support. This marks the start of a series of tasks that I've been postponing for almost a year now, but the inevitable, boring and daunting effort of converting an aging Qt3 code base to Qt4 has finally seen some success.

Still a bit shy, but surely trying in going out of stealth mode, Qtractor has seen some kind of so-called alpha-releases during the last couple of weeks, in a follow-up to its respective LAC2007@TU-Berlin presentation.

As everything in life, all good and bad things go to an end. That is also the case with the 5th International Linux Audio Conference, which took place at the Technischen Universität Berlin, TU-Berlin for short, during the four whole days, March 22 through 25. It is now over and I am now back home safely.

That's it. I'm ready and so are Qtractor. Some late bugs have been fixed, others been slightly re-touched, but I guess it's all set for throwing this puppy into the beasts.

I think Qtractor has reached a fairly stable status, after some small changes and fixes. The major fix honorable enough to mention deals with MIDI track mute/solo switching. It is now working as expected, after lurking and annoyingly unfixed for quite some time. Disparate session sample-rates are also subject of a suggestive warning message and then tentatively converted.

This has been a great week. After a quick and brief brainstorming, I decided to implement some basic MIDI Machine Control (MMC) support into Qtractor. This covered the basic transport functions and, most notably, it changed the Rewind and Fast-Forward actions behavior, now resembling the tape-recorder paradigm. Or sort of.