You are here

Qtractor 0.4.3 - The Fussy Doula released!

Fall is upon us. Summer is gone. Trivial speaking, as it marks yet one's another birthday, mine that is. It also marks the approaching bankruptcy of this funny F&D release code-names. One can also think as the last and stable release before a probable next generation do break all loose. Automation and full MIDI control is popping up over the horizon. So take all children home and be prepared for the worst. Nah, don't be that afraid. With some help from good friends, everything can and shall be arranged. No second thoughts. No hard feelings. Meanwhile...

Qtractor 0.4.3 (fussy doula) released!

Release highlights:

  • Audio send/return aux. inserts (NEW)
  • Mixer peak meters gradient eye-candy (NEW)
  • MIDI System Exclusive (SysEx) setup manager (NEW)
  • MIDI Playback/Queue timer resolution option (NEW)
  • MIDI Instrument definitions from SoundFont 2 files (NEW)
  • MIDI Output bus default instrument (NEW)
  • Buses dialog manager update (FIX)
  • Plugin references by label (FIX)
  • First audio metronome beat/bar (FIX)
  • Ghost clip selections (FIX)
  • Overlapping MIDI clips (FIX)

Website:

http://qtractor.sourceforge.net

Project page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor

Downloads:

Weblog (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.

Change-log:

  • External preset files are not removed nor deleted from the file-system anymore.
  • Connections support for UTF-8 encoded client/port names.
  • Force track and clip properties dialog widget to be modal as it should from their beginning dawn.
  • Audio effect send/return aux. inserts are implemented as special pseudo-plugins (Plugins/Inserts).
  • Reset play-head position on auto-backward and keep playback rolling when continue past end transport option is not set.
  • MIDI clip editor (aka piano-roll/matrix aditor) gets better on the virtual piano keyboard eye-candy side of things ;).
  • Plugins are now also referenced by label, avoiding plugin index clash/misses eg. when plugin object file/path changes or is moved externally.
  • Keyboard focus is now cleared/reset from the main toolbar time and tempo spin-boxes when editing gets finished (eg. Enter key is pressed).
  • First audio metronome beat/bar now played back correctly (fixes bug #2841437).
  • Client to/from port (dis)connections now found consistent as good ol'QjackCtl behavior (fixes bug #2834657).
  • All dirty open MIDI clip editors are now prompted to save before the main application closes (fixes bug #2835516).
  • Mixer level meters get their long deserved gradient look.
  • Fixed any ghost clip selections that were haunting the main track view, specially after undo/redo.
  • Increased tolerance on reading corrupt MIDI files (SMF).
  • A MIDI SysEx manager is being finally introduced, in some primordial rather basic form though. MIDI System Exclusive (SysEx) event strings may now be freely assigned to MIDI output buses only, allowing for proper setup of external outboard MIDI equipment. Each bus may have an unlimited SysEx queue that gets sent out on every connection change (see View/Buses.../MIDI/SysEx...).
  • A default MIDI instrument name may now be assigned to any MIDI output bus (see View/Buses.../MIDI).
  • More legacy headers, stdio.h and stdlib.h, are yet again necessary to build with gcc/g++ >= 4.4 (as patch noted by Alexis Ballier on Gentoo bug report #274168, thanks).
  • Bus manager dialog (View/Buses...) gets new columns on the left pane buses list as for displaying number of channels and bus mode.
  • Crash when updating bus probably fixed (bug #2811630).
  • Fixed glitch displaying beat snap/grid lines on MIDI clip editor, incidental to clips located at absolute zero time.
  • Overlapped MIDI clips were rendering garbled note events to DSSI/VSTi plugins, now fixed.
  • New MIDI Playback/Queue timer (resolution) option is now available (see View/Options.../MIDI).
  • MIDI instrument definitions may now be imported from plain SoundFont files.

Cheers && Enjoy.

Comments

Hi & great software

How do I enable librubberband at build time on ubuntu?

rncbc's picture

install the librubberband-dev package; then ./configure build script will automagically take care of it.

hth

So far I like 0.4.3 a lot! It's rock solid and just runs so smoothly. Keep up the awesome work!

Best,

Jeremy

rncbc's picture

I guess you aren't North-American (nor am I, but I'll say it anyway) 'coz it surely seems like appropriate:

Happy thanks-giving!

Just started using Qtractor-0.4.3, and am very impressed with all the work you've done since the last time I tried it (several releases ago). Admittedly, it's also the first time I've used DSSI plugins too, but it's all working very well together. And glad to see I can edit the time signatures now. Excellent stuff!

rncbc's picture

Awesome

Qtractor 0.4.3 (ie. the fussy doula release) is already several months old :) SVN trunk is where big new things are happening. Guess what, LV2 plugins support is under way and yet functional. Try it out. It needs your either good or bad impression, always :))

Cheers

Hey there...Really like this program...But I'm a complete linux noob...could you show me exactly what to enter to make "./configure build script will automagically take care of it." This happen?...I'm on Mint 7 Main Edition less than one week on any type of Linux OS... I have installed the librubberband dev package 1.2-1 ...but it still says Version: 0.4.3
Build: Dec 18 2009 00:41:32
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (libmad) file support disabled.
Pitch-shifting support (librubberband) disabled.
OSC service support (liblo) disabled.
DSSI Plug-in support disabled.
VST Plug-in support disabled.

Any Help...Thanks...

rncbc's picture

You'll have to rebuild qtractor from source.

After you install librubberband-dev you must reconfigure and recompile qtractor source tree, that's it. If you're new to building software from source, I must warn you that you probably will need to install a lot of development packages first. Here's a list o f what I can tell from memory: most importantly, of course, gcc/g++, then autoconf, automake, libqt4-dev, libjack-dev, libasound2-dev, libsndfile-dev, libvorbis-dev, ladspa-sdk, and all their dependencies (and believe me there are plenty:).

After you get all that installed you can grab the released source tarball or, if you want to try the latest and greatest, one of the svn snapshots.

Uncompress the downloaded file (nb. x.y.z depends on the exact version you've downloaded):

tar -xvf qtractor-x.y.z.tar.gz

then move to the source tree directory:

cd qtractor-x.y.z

configure the build:

./configure

that's when you see whether all needed dev packages are in place. If satisfied with it, proceed to actual compilation:

make

If all went well (ie. no errors) you got there a pristine qtractor executable ready for launch. Try it:

./qtractor

If you can get it here you ain't a Linux noob any longer :)

HTH

Add new comment