[LAD] [ANN] Qtractor 0.3.0 (fluffy doll) released!

Merry season greetings!

After a very long quarantine period, and while after the last Flirty
Ditz romance, this pet has calmly bumped a few more steps ahead. Please
welcome, my Christmas present to y'all,

  Qtractor 0.3.0 (fluffy doll) has been released!

Same old intro follows:

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 ;)

Release highlights:

* Paste-Repeat command. (NEW)
* Punch in/out recording. (NEW)
* Session/project template support. (NEW)
* Current track auto-monitoring. (NEW)
* MIDI buses now supporting multi-timbral instrument plug-ins. (NEW)
* Individual clip gain/volume, normalize and audio/MIDI file export. (NEW)
* Copy/paste to desktop environment clipboard. (NEW)
* and many, many fixes and new bugs ;)

Website:

  http://qtractor.sourceforge.net

Project page:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor

Downloads:

  - source tarball
  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.3.0.tar.gz

  - user manual
  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.3.0-user-manual.pdf

Weblog (think 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.

Features:

- Multi-track audio and MIDI sequencing and recording.
- Developed on pure Qt4 C++ application framework (no Qt3 nor KDE
dependencies).
- Uses JACK for audio and ALSA sequencer for MIDI as multimedia
infrastructures.
- Traditional multi-track tape recorder control paradigm.
- Audio file formats support: OGG (via libvorbis), MP3 (via libmad,
playback only), WAV, FLAC, AIFF and many, many more (via libsndfile).
- Standard MIDI files support (SMF format 0 and 1).
- Non-destructive, non-linear editing.
- Unlimited number of tracks per session/project.
- Unlimited number of overlapping clips per track.
- XML encoded session/project description file.
- Point-and-click, multi-select, drag-and-drop interaction (drag, move,
drop, cut, copy, paste, delete, split)
- Unlimited undo/redo.
- Built-in mixer and monitor controls.
- Built-in connection patchbay control and persistence (a-la QjackCtl).
- LADSPA, DSSI and native VST plug-ins support.
- Unlimited number of plug-ins per track or bus.
- Plug-in presets, programs and chunk/configurations support.
- Audio/MIDI clip fade-in/out (linear, quadratic, cubic).
- Audio/MIDI clip gain/volume, normalize and export.
- Audio clip time-stretching (WSOLA-like or via librubberband),
pitch-shifting (also via librubberband) and seamless sample-rate
conversion (via libsamplerate).
- Audio/MIDI track export (mix-down, merge).
- Audio/MIDI metronome bar/beat clicks.
- MIDI clip editor (matrix/piano roll).
- MIDI instrument definitions (a-la Cakewalk(tm))
- JACK transport sync master.
- MMC control surface enabled.
- Configurable keyboard shortcuts.

Change-log:

- Almost complete rewrite of the plugin configuration and parameter
initialization logic.
- MIDI bank/program selection is now taken into account on plugins
initialization and replication.
- Fixed initial parameter values for native VST plugins.
- Track form plugin lists are now properly (re)initialized when track
type changes.
- Generic plugin forms now have the option to show/hide the parameter
widgets through the new "Params" button.
- New auto-monitor toggle option (menu Track/Auto Monitor): the current
selected track is now set on monitor and MIDI channel omni-mode
automagically, as a convenient workflow feature (kindly suggested by
Holborn).
- MIDI clip editor Tools menu is not disabled anymore when there's no
selection, drop-down menu items are instead.
- Make all recorded clips to honor either the punch-out or play-head
accumulated position; resolve all pending MIDI sequence note events on
record stop/close.
- Major silent move: audio plugins chain are now applied in a
pre-fader/meter basis as is usually implied from the mixer strip layout
ie. signal flows from the top to the bottom.
- All MIDI buses may now have plugins inserted so that multi-timbral
synth/sampler plugins get driven to their fullness.
- MIDI track plugin's dedicated audio output bus may now be effective,
as it seems, good old master audio output bus was being used, no matter
what.
- Paste-repeat command has been introduced, now allowing to replicate
and concatenate the clipboard contents over the time-line, with a given
repeat-count and optional period (see menu Edit/Paste Repeat... on the
main and MIDI clip editor windows).
- Normalize tool on MIDI clip editor got rewritten from its previous
brain dead, useless and utterly wrong operation.
- All time offsets and lengths are now zero-bar/beat based when
displayed in the BBT (bar.beat.ticks) format.
- MMC STEP gets adjusted to current snap-per-beat setting.
- Fixed broken initial buffering that was randomly crippling those audio
clips that fit integrally in cached and while on playback.
- Fix initialization of multiple instances of DSSI plugins which
implement run_multiple_synths (eg. fluidsynth-dssi), preventing an
instant crash on activation.
- Exclude deprecated VST elements from compilation.
- Export tracks dialog has new punch in/out range option.
- Somehow realized that looping and punch-recording are two mutually
exclusive states, at least until loop recording (ie. takes) gets real.
- Fixed bug #2249291 - Crash on tempo change; affecting the WSOLA based
time-stretching on all non-stereo audio clips.
- Incomplete audio peaks were being cached prematurely, fixed.
- Make way for paste/dropping items from the system clipboard over the
main track view. Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete of file items have now this
workaround fixed, wrt. Files widget keyboard shortcuts, respectively.
- Clip gain/volume propriety is now in place and reflected in audio clip
waveform drawing in particular.
- A new hideous progress bar is now lurking in the main status line, as
found convenient to display progress of the also new clip tools
(normalize, export, etc.).
- Clip normalize tool is now available (Edit/Clip/Normalise).
- Audio and MIDI clip file export is now available as a tool (see
Edit/Clip/Export...).
- Punch in/out (range) recording is now in experimental shape, with
minimal settings and functionality, already accessible through the main
menus, transport toolbars and visible on main tracks view and MIDI
editors as magenta colored line markers.
- External MIDI control events for channel volume (7) and channel
panning (10) are now handled properly through session tracks.
- Session file templates make its debut with new usability option, on
whether new sessions are created based on existing template file (see
View/Options.../Display/Session/New session template; nb. session
templates are just regular session files but loaded and saved with no
media content (no clips nor files).
- Grayed/disabled palette color group fix for dark color themes.
- Implicit attempt to flush all pending notes for some, if not most
plugin instruments (eg. VSTi), on playback stop.
- Fait-divers: desktop menu file touched to openSUSE conventions.
- Internal refactoring alert: Session and Options instances are now
being redesigned as singletons, preparing to get out of the way from the
master GUI/MainForm instance.
- Clip drawing methods refactored so let the fade-in/out handles get
seen with transparency over the clip graphics content.
- Reset and continue looping even still when continue past end transport
option is not set and playback is rolling.

Hope it makes through a Happy New Year with flying colors ;)

Cheers && Enjoy!

-- 
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela
rncbc@email-addr-hidden
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