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Rosegarden 1.0 Released
bonch writes "Rosegarden 1.0 has been released for Linux. From the website: 'Rosegarden is one of the most comprehensive Linux music software projects, and is the only Linux application to offer full composition and recording capabilities to musicians who prefer to use classical notation.' Rosegarden is free software under the GPL. Take a tour or find a package for your distro."
Yeah, the QT and KDE dependencies kind of suck, but what are you gonna do. I run Gentoo with Gnome, but there are a couple of programs that I use that require QT and there is just no getting around it. QCad and LyX come to mind. I was really bitching to myself about LyX depending on QT until I read somewhere on the net that LyX's author is the founder of KDE! Oops hehe. On Gentoo, compiling QT takes a couple of hours on my AthlonXP 2400+, but such is life. You can bet I don't upgrade that puppy very often.
By the way, for those interested, here is a MIDI file that I wrote using Rosegarden a while back that I am using in my game project Space Commander
My Rosegarden creation: commander.mid. For some reason the Verizon server seems buggy and doesn't serve the file properly in FireFox, but I was able to download it using "wget http://mysite.verizon.net/b.d.hilton/commander.mid ". My Netwinder webserver is down right now so all I have is the Verizon webspace to post stuff.
Yeah, I like the sawtooth instrument. So what, I'm a rock'n'roller d00d.
Clickety Click
There's a lot of history behind the Rosegarden developers choice of Qt and KDE. The original Rosegarden dates from the early 1990's, when free toolkits for X GUI development were limited to pretty much nothing but Athena. Rosegarden managed to look good, which was a remarkable acheivement for any application written with the Athena toolkit.
In the late 1990's, the original Rosegarden developers wanted to do a ground up rewrite using a modern GUI toolkit. One of the main developers is very keen on OOP, so C++ was the obvious choice for the implementation. This was attempted using bits of the then nascent GNOME platform, but got bogged down because the GTK+ binding for C++ was not up to scratch.
The dissatisfaction with the GTK+ bindings for C++ lead to the current incarnation of Rosegarden, which uses Qt and KDE. The Rosegarden developers have commented a number of times that using the Qt/KDE framework has saved them having to reinvent the wheel on a number of occasions.
GNOME is my preferred desktop, and GTK+ is my preferred toolkit for GUI development. However, I'm more than happy to install the base KDE libraries to run Rosegarden, as nothing else can touch it for sequencing on Linux.
Well, actually, I think that one of the main issues in linux audio is the quality of the drivers for the soundcards. Even if most of the basic functionnalities of the soundcards are supported today, which allow people to play mp3s and watch movies on linux, the advanced functionnalities often don't work. Maybe any of you could give me their advice on which soundcard is fully supported under linux? Take care, the alsa database at http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ doesn't give too much details on the advanced features of the soundcards like :"does the front panel of a soundblaster extigy 2 ZS platinum work?" or "can I plug an external midi keyboard on my soundcard?"
Thanks for your replies