I must have been terribly busy to miss this one earlier. Or at least completely away from this Earth. It was only yesterday, more than two months later when doing some course browsing over some past magazines, that I've stumbled with joy over one of those, quite by chance though. Surprisingly enough, given that I've the magazine in matter since this late Summer,,my dearest project has been granted a very graceful review from, once again, the Linux Format UK's best-selling Linux magazine. Yes, just half a year later from being the Hottest Pick, Qtractor is now a Hot Pick Revisited on this late August 2008 issue (LXF108). Awe!

Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application, written in C++ on top of Qt Software's Qt4 framework, having JACK and ALSA as its main infrastructures and Linux as native and exclusive platform. Specially suited to the lone-wolf composer, arranger and (re)creative music-maker personal home-studio, it still hopes to evolve as a fairly featured desktop audio/MIDI workstation or at least, a prototypical part of it ;)

Qtractor 0.2.2 (flirty ditz) is out!

Release highlights:

• Stephen Doonan joined documentation team and revised the user manual.
• Spurious MIDI events recording bug now fixed.
• Audio track monitoring and plugin loop processing slightly improved if not fixed.
• MIDI clip editor improved precision and correct snapping.
• Multiple track mute and solo one-click toggling (NEW).
• Better MIDI connection persistance across sessions.
• Record-armed tracks aren't muted on playback anymore (NEW).
• Optimized audio clip waveform caching and drawing.
• Many more or less fixes (see change-log).

Saturday, September the 6th, I was once again pleased to attend the second National openSUSE Portuguese Meeting (ENOS), in a renewed invitation from Carlos Gonçalves. This time I had a chance to talk around the current Linux Audio/MIDI scenario and, of course, my brainchild Qtractor.

Howdy! Vacation time is now gone and the rentrée is upon us, at least on this hemisphere side of the globe ;) Silly season, beloved August, summertime it is. And before it's too late, I'm proud to announce that a new alpha has summoned to the challenge:

Qtractor 0.2.1 (fainty diva) has been released!

Release highlights:

• Gradient eye-candy (NEW)
• DSSI multi-instance plug-in issue fixed
• Clip waveform/piano-roll rendered while recording (NEW)
• MIDI pitch-bend, omni-channel filtering and recording fixes
• Play-head positioning in the thumb-view (NEW)
• And many few more (see change-log below:)

Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 framework [1]. Target platform is Linux, where the a Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio [2] and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI [3] are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

Qtractor is free open-source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) [15].

Thanks to Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas and Guido Scholz, this Qsynth release is now a reality. Main new features are the new rotating knob style options, first full translations, German and Spanish and last but not least, there's this Windows^TM all-in-one package available (includes FluidSynth port) for your (sick:) pleasure only. Please read below the brilliant notes from Pedro about this breakthrouth release. Yes, before's too late:

Qsynth 0.3.3 (stable) is out!

For the clueless, Qsynth is a Qt GUI frontend application to the excellent FluidSynth soft-synth library implementation for the SoundFont 2 specification.

I am pleased to announce this new and long due release of QjackCtl, the Qt GUI for the awesome JACK Audio Connection Kit.

Release highlights are mainly about final JACK-MIDI support for the "evil" Patchbay, new Messages file logging and the most intriguing application window instance uniqueness which will make X11 desktop life easier for everyone (ie. no more duplicates as JACK server gets auto-started as candy bonus:)

After another quarantine period, I am pleased to announce (yet) another maintenance release of my flag-ship toy, Qtractor, an Audio/MIDI multi-track "bedroom" sequencer for the techno-boy and girl. Probably, the major feature highlight for this release, is the new optional support for in-place audio clip pitch-shifting through Chris Cannam's Rubber Band audio time stretcher. This one alone just closes the gap on the techno-boy/girl bedroom-studio prospects, so let's move along, nothing really new to see here :) However, given there were many inner changes in the audio rendering engine everything might just sound a lot less glitchy than previous releases. Therefore, everybody is welcome to upgrade. And please, don't be shy ;)

Qtractor 0.1.3 (frugal damsel) has been released!

Season greetings. As (almost) everybody knows already, or ought to, Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application, written in C++ on the Qt4 framework and Linux is about its native platform. Thus, JACK and ALSA are the main infrastructures that fit to purpose, respectively for audio and MIDI.

Also a known fact is that this is nothing more than my pet, hobby, spare-time-burner, whatever project, but... it's actually my own dogfood where digital music making and (re)creation matters. Yep. I still have this sublime hope to make it evolve as a fairly featured Desktop Audio/MIDI Workstation, one special and dedicated to the personal home­studio. As joked many times before, it's perfectly tagged for the techno-boy bedroom home-studio, but techno-girls can also apply ;). You tell me.

Qtractor 0.1.2 (frantic dame) is out!

As obvious as in any respectable easter egg ;)

Simon W. Fielding writes that after quite some time, and reading between the lines of various posts on the linuxaudio-user mail list, he has finally understood how the QjackCtl Patchbay works and what it is for. Because of that, he has written a brief guide to using the patchbay and the document is here first released into the wild, hoping it will turn out to be useful to someone in the quest to make amusing noises at home.

Thanks Simon, for this excellent piece of work. You've done, in just a few paragraphs, what I've failed to do in all those four years QjackCtl's Patchbay has been around ;) Cheers.