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Qtractor 0.6.4 - The Baryon Throne beta release!

Aw, snap!

Wait, there's no big deal (nor chromium's) cosmic (mis)alignment being announced here now. Rest calm. Sorry to delude some of you :)

But, there's one (notable) leap on this tiny side and part of the universe... (or is it a multiverse? move along...) What I really want to tell is all about this happening and none else's freaking business:

Qtractor 0.6.4 (baryon throne beta) is released!

Release highlights:

  • Punch-in/out over loop-recording/take modes (NEW)
  • Latch/momentary MIDI Controllers toggle mode (NEW)
  • JACK client/port pretty-name (metadata) support (NEW)
  • Custom style and color themes (NEW)
  • Mixer strip multi-row layout (NEW)
  • Muted audio tracks monitoring on playback (FIX)
  • Clip fade-in/out resize on time-stretch (FIX)

Well, although this being yet another milestone--if one may call it that way--it also makes it official (yes, deeply engraved in stone) and definitive as a migration to Git can be, as for source-code control and management (it's a dirty job I know, but someone has to do it, right?). Nevermind. It's done.

Meanwhile, please, don't ever hesitate to ask whether any of the above does affect you some way or another. Or maybe anything else, yay? Indeed, the puzzled you feel, the better :)

As for the clueless (as if there's any):

< href="http://qtractor.sourceforge.net">Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 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.

Website:

http://qtractor.sourceforge.net

Project page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor

Downloads:

License:

Qtractor is free, open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

Change-log:

  • Fixed some old loop-recording clip drawing glitches.
  • Current assigned track/channel instrument definition names for MIDI controllers, note keys, RPN and NRPN, are now in effect on the MIDI clip editor drop-down lists, whether available.
  • Clip/Take/Range... input dialog values are now properly sanitized as long to prevent invalid take/folding ranges.
  • Audio capture/export file type default now set to "wav".
  • Extending punch-in/out over loop-recording/takes modes.
  • Make audio tracks monitoring always flow while playback is rolling, independently of their mute/solo state.
  • Fixed undo/redo conversion of audio clip offsets under (automatic) time-stretching eg. due on tempo changes. (ticket by Holger Marzen, thanks).
  • Latch/momentary MIDI Controllers toggle mode introduced (a request by AutoStatic aka. Jeremy Jongepier, thanks).
  • JACK client/port pretty-name (metadata) support is being seamlessly introduced. (EXPERIMENTAL)
  • Audio frame/MIDI time drift correction is now an option on View/Options.../MIDI/Playback/Enable MIDI queue time drift correction.
  • Transport auto-backward feature now honoring last position playback was started.
  • Introducing brand new application user preferences on View/Options.../Display/Options/Custom style and color themes (eg. "KXStudio", by Filipe Coelho aka. falkTX).
  • Mixer widget gets automatic multi-row strip layout.
  • Clip fade-in/out now follows time-stretch resizing, via shift/ctrl+click and drag one of its edges.
  • Fixed a typo causing FTBFS when VST plug-in support is explicitly disabled (./configure --disable-vst).

Donate to rncbc.org

Enjoy && Have plenty of fun.

Comments

hi, this looks like a very interesting project, but there is one big problem for everybody who wants to start with linux audio: we - I - startup the program and all I see is total emptyness. Did you ever start a new installation of Ableton Live? What you see then is: a fully working DEMO SONG showing many features of the program and you can just start playing around exploring the features. With QTractor: I start the software and see nothing, an empty window. How boring, how frustrating. I am looking for how to add any instruments, install linuxsampler, do not understand how to add e.g. kontakt sounds to this, after one hour of not-success I am fedup with linux audio and totally disappointed. I was not able to get one simple sound out of your software, simply because you refuse to give me a working demo song right out of the box. WHY do you make the startup for new users so extremely hard? Why are you spending hours of unbelievable work on this project and then forget to make it accessible somehow with a simple DEMO? My suggestion: please add a fully working DEMO SONG with midi sequences, audio files, linuxsampler and some soft synthesizers in the HELP menu so that it is available with one mouseclick and users can just start diving into linux audio. THANKS!

rncbc's picture

let me remind you that this is no commercial software--it's free, open-source software: read the licensing terms please.

that said, you're in charge to make out of it whatever you wish, just like a handsome too many others have done and took the time and patience to write some documentation and/or crash course tutorials, to name a few:

and i'll elevate it again: all of the above, with no exception, were written by users for users who took the plunge without a dang demo song to start with; all of them started with the blank empty canvas as you and everybody else does.

anyways, if you ever find yourself lost, please don't hesitate to ask here or in the Linux Musicians forum and/or browsing over to the Libre Music Production. site.

you're welcome to help and get help.

hth.
cheers

yPhil's picture

Katapultu, there are many reasons why QTractor does not do what Live does. First, please calm down, and now let's start with the most obvious one : Live ships with instruments and plugins. QTractor does not, because it does not *want* to, mkay? is a MIDI/Audio sequencer that ships with no instruments out of the box (because that does not make sense in its very context, witch is NOT that of a full DAW complete with readymade elevator musak using in-house instruments). Get it? Next ; bear in mind that if we, the QTractor users, managed to get in business by googling around, so should you.

Linux sampler-based demo song? So Linux Sampler becomes a dependancy of QTractor? What about the samples? Did you think that all the way though?

How hard is it to search for MIDI plugins in your distro's packages, install them (QTractor will find them, never mind) then create a MIDI track, load the plugin, click enter a few notes?

I like them. The only thing I somehow dislike is that it doesn't use my native icon/gtk theme.

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