[Lmms-users] LMMS 0.4.0

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

Hi folks,

After 15 months of hard work we're proud to announce the availability of
LMMS 0.4.0, the Qt4-based successor of the 0.3.x series. Thanks to all who 
helped making up this release (especially those who kept up testing and
reporting bugs)!

Most of the core parts were rewritten and the whole application was ported to 
Qt4. This results in a cleanly designed core, much better performance,
higher stability, platform interoperability (LMMS is now running on MS Windows
and Apple's OS X too), and of course a lot of new features.


Most important new features:

 * New artwork and style: LMMS 0.4.0 looks modern, professional, and uniform
 * FX-mixer: Now you can route the output of 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
 * Enjoy SoundFont files directly in LMMS using the new SF2-Player plugin
 * Create chiptune music with the new SID and PAPU plugins
 * Watch your sounds with the new SpectrumAnalyzer-plugin
 * Export your projects at arbitrary samplerates with oversampling of up to 8x
 * LMMS now takes advantage of multiple cores/CPUs by using worker-threads
 * Time signatures other than 4/4 are now supported
 * Triplet notes can be used
 * Render your projects without any GUI/X11 in console mode
 * A selection of best LADSPA plugins is shipped with LMMS (mainly concerns
   Windows version)
 * Basic PulseAudio support (although ALSA is still recommended)
 * cmake-based build system allowing faster builds and greatly improved
   platform interoperability
 * Improved XML-based file format (not readable by 0.3.x)
 * Integration of the popular ZynAddSubFX synthesizer as a LMMS plugin
   (Linux users will find it in the "LMMS extras" package)
 * Heavily improved support for importing MIDI files


Before doing anything, please remove any old version of LMMS you've installed!
Also make sure your distribution ships at least Qt 4.3.0. Having installed
Qt >= 4.4.0 is recommended.


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

a) Users of Ubuntu may want to download ready-to-use binary packages by adding 

     deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tobydox/ubuntu intrepid main

or

     deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tobydox/ubuntu hardy main

to their /etc/apt/sources.list and run "apt-get update" and
"apt-get install lmms". The "lmms-extras" package (containing ZynAddSubFX
as a LMMS plugin) is available too and can be installed easily by
running "apt-get install lmms-extras".


b) Users of other Debian-based distributions may want to run

dget 
http://ppa.launchpad.net/tobydox/ubuntu/pool/main/l/lmms/lmms_0.4.0~ppa-1.dsc 
--build

If all build dependencies are met you'll find ready-to-use DEB-files 
afterwards.


c) Users of other Linux distributions will have to compile LMMS on their own
   which luckily is not that complicated anymore. First grab the source
   tarball from [1] and extract it. Then do the following steps:
   
     cd lmms-0.4.0
     mkdir build
     cd build
     cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
     make
     sudo make install
    
   After running the cmake command you should look at the summary page which
   tells you about missing dependencies. It's desirable to have all of them
   installed to fully enjoy LMMS. After issueing the last command you should
   be able to run LMMS by invoking "lmms".


d) Users of Apple's OS X basically will have to do the same as described
   in c) except that you will have to install xcode and macports before.
   A recent installation of Qt4 (>= 4.3.0) is required as well


e) Users of MS Windows simply have to grab the installer from [1] and launch
   it. An optimized build for 64 bit Windows (hopefully) will be available
   soon.



Now enjoy LMMS! If you encounter any bugs, please submit them at our
bugtracker [2].  If you made a cool song with LMMS it'd be great if you'd  
share it with the community by uploading it to the LMMS Sharing Platform 
(LSP)at [3].

More information is available at [4].


Greetings from a happy
Toby and LMMS developer team


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