[LMMS-devel] LMMS 0.4.0 Alpha

[Tobias D. <tob...@gm...>]

Hi folks,

after months of hard work we're proud to announce the availability of LMMS 
0.4.0 Alpha, the Qt4-based successor of the 0.3.x-series. Thanks to all who 
helped making up this release! Fundamental changes happened, resulting in a 
clean core-design, much better performance, more stability, 
platform-independence and of course a lot of new features.

Most of the core parts were rewritten and the whole application was ported to 
Qt4. Besides much nicer and less code, this finally enables us to provide 
win32-compatibility (ready-to-use win32-builds are available at download-page 
[2]).

Most important new features:

* FX-mixer: now you can route each instrument-track into one of 64 FX-channels
* heavily improved automation: freely usable automation-tracks and -patterns
* controllers: all knobs can be controlled live by one of the controllers:
    - MIDI-controller
    - LFO-controller
    - Peak-controller
* use SoundFont-files directly in LMMS via the new SF2-Player plugin
* watch your sounds with the new SpectrumAnalyzer-plugin
* export your projects at arbitrary sample-rates with oversampling of up to 8x
* new artwork and style: LMMS 0.4.0 looks modern, professional and uniform
* LMMS now takes advantage of multiple cores/CPUs by using worker-threads
* time-signatures other than 4/4 are supported now
* triplet-notes can be used
* render your projects without any GUI/X11 in console-mode
* CAPS- and TAP-plugins shipped with LMMS
* basic PulseAudio-support
* more consistent file-format

Hope I didn't forget something important - feel free to complete this list ;-)


Basic instructions on how to get this release up and running:

0. remove old LMMS-installations and make sure /usr/lib/lmms 
and /usr/local/lib/lmms are empty
1. Download lmms-0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2 from [2]
2. Extract it and go into lmms-0.4.0-alpha
3. run './configure --prefix=/usr --enable-debug CXXFLAGS="-g" CFLAGS="-g"' 
and satisfy all dependencies, configure tells you about
4. run 'make'
5. become root and run 'make install'
6. start LMMS either via the according program-menu or by invoking "lmms"
7. participate in our project-contest by writing one or more cool projects 
which make use of as many as possible of the new features
8. upload your project(s) to LSP [3]
9. see your project(s) as part of the final 0.4.0 release if you belong to the 
winners of our contest!



Anyways this is an ALPHA release, meaning it's neither bug-free nor 100% 
stable. Now it's your task to discover and report all bugs in this release. 
Please use the bugtracker at [1] for this. If possible, please include a full 
backtrace:

$ gdb /usr/bin/lmms
...
(gdb) r <Enter>
...
...
<do whatever crashes LMMS>
...
...
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread ... (LWP ...)]
...
(gdb) thread apply all backtrace

The output of this command is interesting for us!

That's all so far.


[1] https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105168&atid=640434
[2] https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=105168
[3] http://lmms.sf.net/lsp.php



Have fun! :)

toby