Buzztrax Music Production Environment / News: Recent posts

dear audience,

finally a first group of brave people have tried building buzztard from CVS and reported problems. Theses have been taken care of.
Speaking of CVS - the project grows and grows. The main module now has more that 50000 lines of code!

# buzz machine wrapper
As promissed I've spend more time on the buzz machine wrapper for gstreamer. It is starting to do something useful. We can register plugins and already use a few. Next thing is to construct a few test songs using them, to allow playing around with them.
And for those who want to try it, I've added more notes to the README.... read more

happy new year to you!,

we had more discussion with windows buzz clone developers. It would be nice to share as much as possible. So one ideas is to wrap our audio engines into e.g. python or even c#. If we provide the same API, the end-user apps can be shared.
Unfortunately it's not that easy ...

So what has happend in the meantime?

# buzz compatibillity
The buzz song loader now also loads pattern and sequence data.
Still I replace every machine with a sine-generator and every effect with a volume control. Yes, the machine import is not yet ready. But I progressed a little further. I promisse the next hacker weekend, I'll devote to the buzz-machine loader.... read more

dear listeners,

we're getting more attention ;-). The windows buzz community has discovered us.
And I found out how many people are already doing buzz-clones. Fortunately they all concentrate on windows.

# New stuff
I have hacked a great deal on the buzz song loader. This now already loads the machine and connection data. Look at the new screenshot [2] - this shows a loaded buzz-song, but be aware it is sort of fake. Instead of the real machines I use only sinesources and volume plugins right now.
The editor generally has been improved a lot. I have added the context menus for the machine editor. I've also added a work-around for gnomecanvas so that now the machine-labels zoom as well. The machine view now has an adjustable background grid. The view tabs have icons and so on.
Another task I've spend some time with is the buzz machine adapter. It now has a testing script that tries all buzzmachines and generates useful reports for us. These report group machines that still fail by the last log message they produced.... read more

hi hi,

the last month was quite packed for both of us. Still we made progress:

# Stabillity
Many unit tests were comming and going. Now we have some really useful testing
helpers and waffel is using them to re-add new tests. With these helpers we can
correctly test our API pre-condition checks.

# New stuff
Ensonic had refactored many core classes to allow for new features. So which are
the new features?
At first we have working configuration stuff. When gconf is available, buzztard
uses gconf to store settings. In bt-edit the user can now choose the audio-sink
to use. The gnome-settings are used as default and we have some general fallback
mechanism.
The machine view is now working. After loading songs one now sees the machines
and wires. The machines can be moved around. And it does *not* flicker as it
does in buzz (even though the graphics are antialiased). Note, it took
ensonic amazingly long to do the wire-triangle calculations
The bt-edit now has level-meters that show the volume while playing. Under the
hood ensonic had to do quite a lot of rewrites for this.
And bt-edit now support looped playback as well.... read more

hello everyone,

as usual - the summary of the month.

#1 buzz compatibillity
As I had shortly mentioned - we reached two important milestones regarding the buzz compatibillity - we can fully decode the buzz song files including the compressed waves. Secondly, we can run buzz machines. Still the buzz machine wrapper needs a lot of work.

#2 bugfixes
This month we did not just added new feature, we concentrated on adding unit-test and stabilising the code. We now have about 45 unit-tests and fix alot of the memory management. The current code should be much stabler now.
It already pays back that we have decided to base the project on gobject. This technology helps alot to *know* if there are meory leaks or not.... read more

hello everyone,

as usual - the summary of the month.

#1 buzz machine wrapping
Last month I've told that we can alreay call methods on the windows buzzmachine dlls. That was right and wrong. The bad news is, that these two methods we could call return C++ object instances and it is probabably impossible to just use these with C++ code compilsed by gcc (remmeber the buzzmachines are compiled using msvc). Anyway we found a solution for that. And now we can also initialize the plugins (that is calling a C++ method in the dll).... read more

good news everyone ;-) The developer weekend was quite succesful. But one thing, after the other.

#1 new website
We have registered www.buzztard.org and have the new homepage running there. The page is 100% based on the mediawiki. Therewith we can easilly extend the site and discuss about the development.

#2 the code
Over the weekend we've added more foundation stuff like a proper autogen.sh, i18n files (internationalisation). Further we done some work on the gtk-editor.
And the best thing. We can load native windows buzzmachines and call methods of them!... read more

it's been some time since the last status update, but we're still alive.

state of the code:
Another big batch of coding has been done. We ported the inital plugin-network code toward GObject. Now the network part loads from XML already.
Currently we are coding the objects to represent the event data, namely Sequences and Patterns.

1st developer meeting:
We have scheduled a first developer meeting starting in the evening of the 6. Aug and running till the evening of 8. Aug.. During the hacking sessions the core developers will be online in the IRC channel #buzztard at irc.quakenet.org.
Feel free to join us there for helping, asking, whatever ...... read more

just want to let you know, that now we have the base project skelleton in cvs and we started with the internals of the program.
The examples we now have can already play simple song structures with patterns!

The next step is to start to build the classes based on GObject and to implement Song I/O.
Then we can think about the GUI.

Since a while we now play around with gstreamer and now we have decided that this will be the base of buzztard.
We have already a few example sources in cvs. Apart we made good progress with design docs. So hopefully we can start with the buzztards player lib soon.

We are currently evaluating gstreamer as the base for buzztard an it looks good so far.
Apartt many more design quetions have been disussed.
We hope to start coding sonn ;-)

is the project dead.
it may look so, we haven't had nearly any time to start off.
there is another project called Rebuzz (at www.rebuzz.org" which look promissing, but we had no success to get in touch with the author.